


the habit of coming back

by csoru



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Canon-Typical Spy Mindgames, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Trust Issues, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 05:13:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4733957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/csoru/pseuds/csoru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The cover stories, the obsession; Napoleon has little regard for classical spycraft. The true art, and true accomplishment, comes from staging. Every small piece of an assignment’s mise en scène, arranged in the perfect order to pull off the perfect heist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt on the kinkmeme](http://kinkfromuncle.dreamwidth.org/640.html?thread=94080): Napoleon betrays the team on Waverly's orders, and angst ensues.
> 
> Thanks to Ceredin and Ling for proofreading and to the twitter hivemind for the encouragement and enthusiasm.

The gun goes off at 10:43 in the morning.

…

The alarm is set to go off at 6:30 in the morning, but, after years of repetition and training, Illya’s routine is so ingrained that he wakes with the sun and is out of bed before the hotel night shift personnel go home. He hears the woman who comes into his room once a day to take out the trash saying goodbye-and-see-you-tomorrow to someone with a slightly higher, slightly nasal voice. By the time they both pass his door, chatting amicably, he’s washing the remains of sleep off his face and pulling on running clothes. There is a liminal, timeless quality to hotel corridors that he notices every morning: no windows and the lights always on, thick carpet that muffles noise and makes footprints obvious to the trained eye; air a little stale, ceiling gone off-white from cigarette smoke. They all look the same. It sets his teeth on edge, when he stops to think about it.

Lisbon isn’t empty in the early morning, with fresh sunlight catching each imperfection in both cobbles and asphalt, but no one pays much heed to one man in unmarked fatigues running fast but steady in the general direction of the riverfront. He could have more of a workout without attracting attention, so far from the Iron Curtain, but the sense of security is illusory. Someone, somewhere, could be — perhaps is — always watching. If not, then Illya alone is a self-perpetuating panopticon: prisoner and guard, all in one, surveilling no other as carefully as himself.

He makes it all the way to the bridge construction site without stopping. Their in with the government expects that the bridge will be named for Salazar, one way or another. Their in with the government is tight-lipped about everything that matters, but lets slip inconsequential details that do nothing to speed up the team’s departure from Portugal.

Forcing his breath to come in time with his footsteps, Illya takes a tram back to the hotel. He smiles at a young couple, when they glance at him nervously. It puts them at ease.

The routine, after he’s climbed the three floors up back to his room, is this: he takes a freezing cold shower (another part of the regime instilled in him by each successive handler he had in Leningrad), stumbles out of it shivering but fully awake. Rings for room service, coffee instead of tea — a small luxury that would make sense for Sławomir Rzeźnicki, the man who Illya is in Lisbon according to his passport. While he’s waiting for the food to arrive, he checks the room, balcony and bathroom for bugs. They always show up when he’s out running, though this time the search is fruitless. Illya checks again, to be certain. He’s not sure what is a more irritating idea: that Napoleon might have hidden surveillance equipment well enough that Illya actually wouldn’t find it, or that he changed the rules, again, on a whim.

The teeth-grinding unpredictability is, on its own, part of the game’s appeal. It’s just that Illya doesn’t relish the unthinkable prospect of losing.

He checks whether the earrings he got for Gaby are still under the cracked balcony tile — he got them on a whim, too, an impulse-apology and peace offering: _I can’t be who you need or what you want, but I can be enough to keep you alive_ — and then the traps in bedside drawers. Untouched, all.

‘You think you’re clever, cowboy,’ he mutters irritably, and half expects to turn around and see Napoleon lounging in the doorway, wearing a self-satisfied smirk and saying, _Oh, I know I am_.

The food arrives, then. Illya doesn’t check what time it is.

…

Gaby doesn’t check what time it is when she wakes up. Waking up is a process, anyway. Her head is killing her and the light falling in through the blinds seems to take immense pleasure in causing her immense pain. Oh, for the times when she could drink herself into oblivion because she felt like it, then sleep off the hangover. It’s different, far worse, when she’s meant to be playing a part — a spoilt socialite, no less, rich and obnoxious and obnoxiously bored: a vapid caricature that should have been obvious playacting, because no real woman could ever be so awful except in the fevered imaginations of repressed spies. Gaby rolls over onto her back and groans, and keeps groaning.

Their in with the Salazar government owes her. Gaby is exceptionally gifted at remembering owed favours.

Swearing at length, she gets up to walk only far enough to pull the window curtains shut. With the light dimmed, the pain is less. She finds a glass of water, downs it. Next to it on the coffee table is a folded piece of paper, kept in place by a nondescript silver tie pin. Too nondescript for Napoleon, and ties would be out of character for Illya on this assignment. Gaby frowns; the water, she’s put on the table herself before crawling into bed, but neither the note nor the pin were there when she came back in last night. The thought of someone coming into her room while she’s there, asleep — even if it’s a semi-anonymous, disposable hotel room in a city as alien to her as the moon — is enough to make the hair at the back of her neck stand on end.

She puts the tie pin in the breast pocket of her pyjamas, unfolds the note; reads it, rolls her eyes, and rips the paper before tossing it into the rubbish bin.

Her head still feels like a nuclear testing polygon, as if it were about to be irrevocably subsumed by a cloud of apocalyptic radiation, but mournful agony has never sped up anyone’s hangover. Gaby tosses the curtains aside and bravely resists the impulse to hiss at sunlight before opening the balcony door.

Then she orders breakfast, and aspirin, and about twelve extra towels for the roughly twelve extra hours she intends to spend in the bath. Next time, she promises herself; next time when there is an undercover intel-gathering assignment that requires an agent to blend in, she is going to give Waverly a piece of her mind. Napoleon is far better at playing cat and mouse and getting pawed by spoilt, drunk rich people. He probably enjoys it, too.

Gaby glances at the clock; almost quarter to eleven, plenty of time left before they’re supposed to head to the briefing. She settles back on the bed, content to wait for room service. Let someone attend her for once. She’s earned it.

10:43. Gaby starts humming a song she’s heard in the café across the street. She —

A shot rings out, like the crack of thunder.

She jumps to her feet. A gun, going off, close enough that it echoes inside her skull and nausea threatens to make her violently ill. Somewhere near, downstairs. Unthinking, heart already racing, Gaby reaches for the gun Illya bullied her into carrying, the one she keeps next to the bed. She runs out into the corridor barefoot, her steps muffled by the thick fitted carpet, following the sounds of struggle and a familiar voice saying something she can’t parse.

She’s halfway down the stairs when Illya runs down past her, taking four steps at a time. When he wants to — when he needs to — he can move as quickly and quietly as a tiger on the hunt. He’s armed, but he’s always armed.

‘Illya, what —’

‘Stay behind me,’ he says without turning back, and he hits the first floor, then, easily shouldering the heavy stairway door open with the force of his momentum.

Gaby is there a second later, not stupid enough to try to outrun Illya but unwilling to be left behind. She enters the first floor corridor right after him, and the scene that unfolds before her —

The carpet is a dark, rich burgundy red, but it can’t mask the sheer amount of blood —

The scene before her freezes the blood in her veins and knocks the breath out of her, and she comes up next to Illya, who stands, unmoving, as if turned to stone by one revelatory glance. They’re both breathing fast, and both their breaths are loud in the suddenly quiet corridor, save for Waverly’s weak noise of pain.

There’s so much red. Waverly is on the floor, one hand pressed to his stomach and the other to his torso. They’re red from blood, just like his sleeves up to the elbows. It’s soaked the entire front of his dress shirt, is soaking into the carpet, and as he tries to take in a breath there is a horrifying, wet noise that makes Gaby think — one bright coherent thought, even as the rest of her conscious mind is blanking out, all static — that one of his lungs must have been punctured, or shot clean through.

Shot clean through by Napoleon, who kneels in Waverly’s blood. He has a thick folder tucked under one arm. He’s holding the gun with no indication of planning to let go of it any time soon; his index finger is still on the trigger. Next to Gaby, Illya makes an abortive gesture, like a puppet jerked forward by an invisible string, before he falls still again. The movement makes Napoleon look up.

Downstairs, there are loud voices; someone calls for help, or assistance, in thickly accented Portuguese. There’s yelling.

Napoleon glances from Illya, to Waverly, to Gaby, and back to Waverly. He focusses on Gaby, in the end, as if he’s already dismissed the thought of negotiating with Illya. Gaby wishes she could force her limbs to move; on the floor, Waverly’s hands fall to his sides and the wet rasps stop.

‘I’m afraid the situation isn’t nearly as sordid as it must look,’ says Napoleon.

‘Get away from him, Solo.’

‘Gaby —’

‘Get away from him!’ she yells. Finally, her legs obey her. In time with her first step forwards Napoleon rises, takes a step back.

Everything happens at once, then, or seems to: it all comes in flashes, a little muted and faraway. In one heartbeat Gaby is the one kneeling beside Waverly, scrambling to find the wounds amongst all the red; all the thick and sticky and still-hot red. Her hands are soaked in it in the next heartbeat, and she pays attention to Napoleon and Illya only marginally. One of them says, sounding strangled, ‘Are those Salazar government files?’ and the other replies, ‘I really would prefer it if you let me explain, because this time I actually _can_ —’

‘Stay with me,’ Gaby is saying to no one in particular. ‘Please. Please.’ Somewhere near, above her, something slams or is slammed into the wall so hard the plaster cracks. There’s a gasp, but it could be Gaby who gasps. She’s found the two gunshot wounds, one next to Waverly’s navel and the other in his chest, the right side. Small favour that it wasn’t the heart.

Soon enough — how soon, Gaby can’t tell — Illya is kneeling beside her, and it’s only then that she realises how quiet everything has gone. She’s holding Waverly as best as she can when she is awkward and shaking, and she doesn’t know what to do.

‘Solo?’

‘Gone,’ Illya says tersely. When Gaby lifts her gaze from Waverly’s too-pale face, it’s to see Illya stripping out of his jacket and starting to search the pockets.

‘Did Napoleon —?’

‘Yes.’

‘Illya —’

‘He lost a lot of blood,’ says Illya, nodding at Waverly and not looking at Gaby at all. His accent is slightly more pronounced than what she is used to, more clipped, but it’s the only indication of what Illya might be feeling, that he’s feeling anything: his hands don’t shake, and his breathing is unnervingly even.

He takes out an elegant, black fountain pen out of the breast pocket of his jacket. He uncaps the pen, revealing a slim silver nib. The jacket falls to the floor, forgotten. Gaby watches as Illya rips open Waverly’s blood-soaked shirt, unmindful of the buttons that scatter everywhere. Without the fabric in the way, Gaby can’t help a noise she herself can’t identify. It falls somewhere short of a cry, somewhere east of a whimper. Waverly’s skin is pallid even with all the blood staining his chest and abdomen, and he’s barely breathing at all.

Illya frowns to himself, pen gripped tight like a surgical tool. He seems to be counting something.

Counting ribs.

‘What,’ Gaby manages, ‘are you doing?’

‘He has punctured lung. I need to relieve pressure before he drowns in his own blood.’

Gaby knows what he means; or, rather, she extrapolates a meaning from Illya’s words, as nonsensical as they are, and as unknowable as she wishes the meaning was. She lets go of Waverly’s unmoving body when Illya tells her to, breathes through her mouth as she watches Illya once again count ribs and measure a distance from — the heart? The lung? Solar plexus? He measures a distance and presses his index and middle finger to a place on Waverly’s torso that looks as fragile to Gaby as the rest of him. She snaps her head around when Illya takes aim with the fountain pen, but even with the bland hotel wallpaper searing geometric patterns into her retinas she can’t block out the noises: the awful, meaty crunch of bone and cartilage; grinding, grating twist of the pen’s barrel as Illya pulls it off and then, then, the nauseating wet wheeze of air inflating Waverly’s collapsed lung.

‘Gaby,’ says Illya, in a voice that is uncharacteristic for him. He sounds gentle, and kind, and more than a little worried. ‘It will be all right.’

Liar, Gaby thinks, liar, liar. It’s only then that she realises she’s pressing her forehead to the wall, fingers clenched tight enough that she’s managed to tear off strips of the wallpaper.

She forces herself to unlock her knees and elbows. She turns. She looks at Illya and nowhere else.

‘What,’ she starts, then takes in a shallow breath. ‘What do you need me to do?’

…

Napoleon only waits downstairs long enough to hear Gaby’s voice, choked and audibly nauseated: ‘What — What do you need me to do?’

He shuts the bathroom door, locks it with a hairpin he stole from the receptionist that morning. It’s a fairly decent bathroom, and currently the most decent part of it to Napoleon’s trained eye are the windows. A tight fit, to be sure, but nothing he hasn’t done before. The messenger bag is where he left it last night, below the sink, a worn leather briefcase with a decidedly unstylish shoulder strap that, hopefully, the receptionist won’t miss any more than the hairpin. It’s a disappointing lack of a challenge to pack all of the documents he’d taken from Waverly’s room and heave himself over the toilet stall and up, towards the window, unlatch it and slide feet-first onto the parapet.

Napoleon chose this particular bathroom for the simple expedience of having the parking lot right beneath it, and Waverly’s car a chess knight’s move to the right. (Not that he’s starting to pick up the odd chess terminology from Illya. That would be unthinkable.) It isn’t the ground floor, which would be far too easy and therefore a thing unlikely to ever happen to Napoleon, but isn’t the worst, either. That time in Montevideo, for instance — with the casino, and the chase, and the gilded Ottoman knife he later sold to the Musée du Louvre without telling the curator (a lovely woman, if blunt, in every meaning of the word) that it was not only a replica, but one with which he was nearly stabbed to death a week prior — well. Montevideo was, as far as these things went, probably one of his lower points.

His knees are still aching, bones still rattled from the jump he had to take, when he makes it to the car. The keys work. Of course they do; Napoleon had had a copy made back in Istanbul, long before this assignment, back when Waverly had not a single thing to be suspicious of, or about, except the usual. The occasional theft, some small-time fraud, and such.

Lisbon is unsurprisingly busy at noon during a weekday. As much as Napoleon would like to breeze past the city until the humming vibration of the engine dulled the sharp edges of contingencies he’s obsessing over, contingencies upon contingencies and always an out, causing a multiple crash and vehicular manslaughter would be the farthest thing from subtlety at a time when subtlety will keep him alive.

It’s a good thing Illya is back at the hotel, with Gaby and all that blood; if it were up to him and his unnoticeability, they would both be dead by now. Possibly twice over.

There is, after all, nothing about Illya that is unnoticeable. If there was, Napoleon doubts he would still —

Well, regardless; out of sight, et caetera.

The day so far is sunny and bright, a far cry from the gloom of the hotel Napoleon left behind, with its peeling paint and tacky wallpaper and cheap furniture masquerading as American knock-offs, twice removed from the real deal. Napoleon rolls down the driver-side window and lets himself smile. He intends to take as much joy in the sun as is possible before the inevitable descent into dark, dank basements and codewords and passwords; men so utterly preoccupied with obsessing over the smallest details in their cover stories that could give them away to notice that all the rest of them are too preoccupied with the details in their cover stories that could give _them_ away to notice, on and on in a frankly ludicrous unending cycle.

The cover stories, the obsession; Napoleon has little regard for classical spycraft. The true art, and true accomplishment, comes from staging. Every small piece of an assignment’s mise en scène, arranged in the perfect order to pull off the perfect heist.

Spycraft, in Napoleon’s experience, is far more entertaining when thought of in terms of theft, or theatre, or both. Staging of props and actors, of lighting and sound, down to voice modulation and the closing distance between operatives — or between an operative and an expensive, pretty thing that will look fantastic on his mantlepiece, or the selling of which will look fantastic in his bank account — and then, finally, act five.

Like so.

…

The alarm is set to go off at 6:30 in the morning, to coincide with Illya’s alarm, in case Napoleon’s wakes him up or draws his attention since, as he’s already established, he finds it suspicious when Napoleon is up before noon in the best of cases. Then again, he finds Napoleon in general suspicious. It’s somewhat depressing that a lot of the initial planning is tailored to either throw Illya off the scent, derail his possible distrust, or simply give him enough to do to not be too much of a bother.

Gaby won’t be up for another few hours; Waverly gave her the assignment he did so she would be out of the game in the morning, too tired to be up early even without the very real threat of a hangover. Her dress for the evening was something of a work of art, a nightmarish Cubist phantasmagoria. Napoleon hopes she will grow to enjoy these kinds of assignments as much as he does — did — and see them for the reward that they are, coming from a handler.

But Gaby is not his responsibility, in any case, and even if she were Napoleon knows there is no one who would take better care of her than Illya in case Waverly —

In case something happens, which, of course, it might. They’re dangerous people with dangerous jobs.

He’s ready to leave by 10am — having collected the files he was meant to collect and a little bit of extra that someone, somewhere, is going to be happy to receive in exchange for rudimentary protection — with enough time to take care of business. On a whim, he leaves his room in perfect order, and leaves Illya’s surveillance equipment neatly arranged on the coffee table next to the window. It makes a sweet tableau: half-full pitcher of water, plastic vase with wilting flowers, four small audio recorders and one waterproof microphone. Still life with paranoia.

‘I really am sorry about this, Solo,’ says Waverly at 10:19 in the morning. They meet on the first floor balcony, outside Waverly’s room. The street below, its air and asphalt, are starting to warm from the mid-morning sun, and pedestrians and cars alike move with a fresh purpose that will be replaced with resignation in a few hours’ time. The room is on the other side of the building from the others. Napoleon was the one to book all of them.

He peers at Waverly curiously. ‘Are you?’

‘Well.’

‘It’s going to be a bit of a drag from now on, for you,’ he says. He leans his elbows against the balustrade, keeping an eye on Waverly’s reflection in the window across the street. It’s not the best reflective surface at this distance, with the sun, but it’s enough. ‘The inevitable complications and explanations, and so on. Oh, and the debriefings. Thank god I won’t be here for that. So, really, I should be the one to be sorry.’

‘Are you, then?’

Napoleon just smiles.

‘Well, it is going to be — interesting,’ Waverly allows, ‘at the start, I expect, yes.’

‘You mean entertaining.’

‘No, I mean interesting, possibly in the worst sense of the word. For instance, I doubt our budget will handle the sheer amount of broken tables, or the quantity of bruising Kuryakin’s ego is able to withstand.’

Napoleon considers the words, considers the options for the immediate future, unravelling swiftly and with little consideration for how ready either Illya or Gaby are for a colleague to go rogue. (Betrayal is too loaded a word, Napoleon decides. There’re all sorts of implications about trust and emotional attachment and, horrifyingly, friendship. He’s not betraying anyone, and certainly not anyone’s trust; and if he is, then that should teach them a valuable lesson about the liminal worth of trust in this game.)

He’s still smiling as he pictures the overturned tables.

‘So you haven’t told them about this assignment,’ he says, a little morbidly pleased. _Interesting_ might be Waverly’s word of choice, but Napoleon would rather stick to _entertaining_ ; he takes the simple pleasures where he can.

‘It is a one-man job, Solo. I’ll tell Gaby after you’ve gone. She is quite the aspiring actress. As for Kuryakin — ah. We need genuine expressions of grief, or at least believable. And, you understand, an extra layer of performative rage does add believability to the grief.’

Napoleon winces. ‘Honestly. _Grief_ might be overstating it a little.’

Waverly only looks at him, expression half inscrutable and half blandly condescending. It sets Napoleon’s teeth on edge, to have someone — to have a superior — look at him like that, which in turn makes him want to do something rash and quite stupid, but he fights the impulse and takes consolation in being the bigger man.

They meet again at 10:40, in the corridor below Gaby’s room: to make sure that she hears and that Illya does, as well, but is too far from the scene to make it there quickly enough to get in the way.

Napoleon holds the documents Waverly told him to take, and he holds the little extra he stole to give himself a margin of illusory safety, and he holds the gun in a hand that doesn’t shake.

‘Try to aim somewhere,’ Waverly says, smoothing his hands over his suit jacket, ‘not immediately lethal, if you will, thank you.’

He’s nervous, Napoleon realises; and as he realises it, he allows himself a half second to acknowledge all the ways in which this could go horribly, un-entertainingly, wrong.

The gun goes off at 10:43 in the morning.

…

There is an excess of noise in Illya’s room by the time he makes it there at 11:21 in the morning; sourceless, illusory noise that, intellectually, he knows is just the roar of blood in his ears and nothing that anyone can hear except him. It removes him from reality, so that noises outside of his head are muted. He clenches and unclenches his fists, again, a third time. Rolls his shoulders, tries a quick breathing exercise that has never worked before and doesn’t work now.

There’s still blood under his fingernails. He had no time to wash his hands.

Illya walks to the bathroom and puts his fist through the mirror. He can barely hear its crash. Glass shards embedded in the skin over his knuckles hurt enough that the roar subsides, and the pain distracts him into a semblance of control. There is glass all over the white tiled floor, and an occasional drop of red that reminds him of the sight of blood on snow. Very distinctive, if morbidly elegant. Another Leningrad memory.

It would be uncaring to let himself bleed all over a hotel room and leave identifiable traces of his presence there, so Illya cleans his hand and wraps it in a dish towel before he starts methodically tearing the room down in search of — other traces. All surveillance equipment, explosives, traps; fingerprints, handprints, conspicuously disturbed patches of dust betraying the shape of what was stood in a given place.

When Gaby finds him, he’s halfway done with packing.

‘He’s alive,’ she says, in lieu of a hello. When Illya only nods, not turning to face her, she goes on: ‘There are — did you know there’s an entire MI6 covert operation in Lisbon? They took him to a secure location. We should clean up here and — and what are you doing?’

‘Packing.’

There is a pause. Gaby moves quietly, barefooted, but not silently. Illya can hear the soft pad of her feet across the floor, until she stands next to him. What he doesn’t expect is for her to take his hand; she wraps her fingers around his wrist, and it’s entirely unsurprising that her fingertips don’t meet while he could hold both of her forearms in one hand. When Illya swallows and turns to her, she’s looking up at him, wide-eyed and thin-lipped.

She’s still wearing the satin pyjamas soaked through with Waverly’s blood. Where their colour is visible, a midnight blue, it compliments the warm brown of her eyes.

‘I don’t know,’ she starts, then reconsiders. ‘I don’t think I’m going to stay calm for much longer. Waverly nearly died, and Solo nearly killed him, and the MI6 wheeled Waverly out of here in a fake ambulance, and I think, I think this is a little too much for me to handle on my own. So bear all of that in mind when I ask, again, what are you doing?’

She’s not holding him too tightly, so Illya turns his wrist in her grip and holds her, in turn. It seems to comfort her an infinitesimal degree.

‘He double-crossed us. We don’t know who pays him, what intel he took and where he wants to sell it. You should stay with MI6, if you trust them.’

‘Right now, I don’t think I trust anyone.’

The corner of Illya’s mouth quirks upwards. ‘Good. Don’t.’

Gaby takes in a breath. She says, ‘All right. I’ll keep an eye on them. On Waverly. And if you want me to do that, I take it to mean you won’t be here to do it yourself, because I’m also assuming you understand that we’re still a team. So. What are you going to do?’

Illya considers, for a moment, whether to tell her the truth. It’s rarely worth it, but he thinks Gaby might not have been considering him to be among the no one she trusts, and he owes her something for that. If they never meet again, he wants the last words spoken between them not to have been part of the game.

‘I am going,’ he says, feeling Gaby’s pulse thrum beneath the pads of his fingers, ‘to kill Napoleon Solo.’


	2. Chapter 2

The memory comes unbidden, on a train to Spandau where the last of his father’s friends is in hiding, right at the edge of the Eastern Bloc. The memory, smudged with time, is of Illya’s mother crossing herself, each night, tips of her fingers brushing her forehead and shoulders, pressed over her heart. She had the pale, long-fingered hands of a piano teacher. It never felt strange to Illya that she would pray, until his father — so proud, then — presented him with an admission letter to the military school in Arkhangelsk.

There, the places where holy icons might have been were occupied by portraits of party leaders and General Secretary Stalin. There, the only crosses were the perpendicular wooden beams that cadets were tied to in preparation for discipline and punishment. Negative reinforcement.

Illya was never as comfortable as when he still wore the navy cadet uniform with something like pride, something like dignity, instead of a constant uphill struggle to prove that he was — is — not his father, his mother, his name or his legacy. The only thing he wanted was to be proud again, and for his country to recognise his loyalty; of course, what he didn’t know then was that, as Major Kirilov used to say, loyalty is a process.

It’s only recently that Illya started to wonder: if loyalty is a process, then what, or perhaps who, should be its course and destination?

By the time he gets off the train, it’s beginning to snow. The building Illya is looking for, if his three-year-old information is reliable, is some distance from the train station. Despite that he’s not ready to leave a trail of people able to recognise him, no matter how unlikely to be picked up, so he turns up the collar of his jacket and passes by the long queue of taxis outside the station. The wind is chilly, but Illya is comfortable with the cold. He’s glad Napoleon isn’t there to point out the stereotypically Russian trait.

He sticks his hands deeper into his jacket pockets, hands balled into fists at the thought of Napoleon.

The apartment complex is a square, squat three-story hymn to socrealism. It doesn’t look old, but it does look derelict and dirty. Unlooked after. Even in the crisp winter air there hangs a sticky aftertaste of coal and smoke, and the walls are blackened from it. Illya expects the dust inside is tinged black, like soot; the price of warmth. He’s never seen it before, but something about it manages to look familiar, somehow. Industrial decay, perhaps. Sverdlovsk has a similar air, and Stalingrad, in places. The nightmare of concrete and grey clings even past the renaming of the city.

Illya climbs up two flights of stairs, passing the sounds of human existence as derelict as the building itself. A crying child on the ground floor; a man yelling on the first. The setting is such a far cry from the exalted splendour of upper class Western Europe that Illya is not sure, for a moment, if he hasn’t simply woken up from a particularly vivid dream. There is always a culture shock to be experienced at the crossing of the Iron Curtain, a certain kind of katabasis of whose direction Illya is never fully sure. He tries not to wonder whether it’s the east or west that is the underworld.

The door he’s looking for is locked, but that has never stopped him before and he doesn’t let it now. Wooden floorboards, bent out of shape from the pervasive dampness of the air, creak when he kneels in front of the keyhole, tools at the ready. The door, too, is unquiet as it inches open.

Given this lack of subtlety, Illya is not surprised to walk into the room only to find himself looking into the barrel of a Tokarev TT-33.

The curtains are drawn, blocking out most of the light from outside, and in the chair situated conveniently opposite the front door Mikhail Fyodorovich Denisov sits with one leg crossed over the other, both hands on the arm rests. The fingers of one are splayed, the other wrapped around the handle of the gun. Even in the near dark, Illya can make out the scar twisting the right side of Mikhail’s mouth into a grisly, cheerless smirk. He’s aged; his hair has more white than brown in it.

‘I’m not here to kill you,’ says Illya, crisp Russian consonants rolling off his tongue with longed-for ease.

Behind his thick glasses Mikhail squints. The plastic frames are achingly similar to those Illya remembers from his childhood. ‘Is that —?’ He takes in a breath. ‘Illya Nikolaevich, as I live and breathe. It’s been so long. You’ve grown handsome.’

‘Hello, uncle.’ Illya smiles wide enough for Mikhail to see it clearly. He doesn’t mind that Mikhail’s grip on the gun hasn’t wavered. ‘I need your help.’

‘And what help could you need from your old uncle Mikhailo? I’m out of the game. I’ve been out of the game since before your father —’

‘I know. And I know you’ve been hiding right under Moscow’s nose, just like I know your name is on their wanted list with standing orders to kill on sight. Treason, wasn’t it?’

There is a long pause. Mikhail considers him, expressionless, but not yet ready for a fight. Perhaps he’s become accustomed to the simple luxury of living. After a tense minute, Mikhail shakes his head. ‘Oh, Illyusha,’ he says. The diminutive has to be a calculated effort, and Illya appreciates the gesture. ‘You work for them?’

‘You knew that already, uncle. All these years you stayed alive because you’ve kept your hand on the pulse. That’s what I need help with. Information. Out of the game or not, you’re the best intel broker I’ve ever heard of.’

‘I won’t have you taking anything back to Moscow Centre.’

‘No,’ says Illya. He smiles again, and imagines how morbid it must look. ‘This is personal.’

…

The memory comes, with little prompting, at the tail end of the second act of Swan Lake. It’s nothing more than the texture of the prima’s costume, the white net tutu trimmed with feathers that look too soft, too ethereal, to be real. Napoleon’s gaze catches for a moment on the fabric, its delicate shimmer, and he remembers another concert hall, another time, another kill list with his name at the top.

It was opera, then, in a long line of socialite outings he attended to establish a cover. Titles and synopses and arias all blend into one unless he makes a conscious effort to recall specifics, but it isn’t the opera itself he remembers now. It’s the woman who approached him after, a duchess, eerily reminiscent in the way she carried herself of Napoleon’s grandmother. She is the one person to have come on to him who he turned down.

Now, as Odette, the prima wrenches herself from Siegfried’s embrace, expression contorted in theatrical agony, and the concert hall’s warm orange lights catch on the sheen of sweat on her neck and collarbone. From his seat in the fifth row Napoleon sees her as less a dancer and more a violin string pulled so taut that a single millimetre in the wrong direction would snap her spine. The sheer iron control she has over her body — and the thread-thin margin by which it could shatter, the prospect morbidly fascinating — brings back memories, too, though Napoleon doesn’t let himself stray in that particular direction.

Instead, he lets the orchestra take his conscious thoughts apart until he remembers no one else’s control but his own.

After the second intermission the seat to his right is vacated. Unsubtle, but Napoleon decides to play along; he busies himself with the libretto while the curtain rises and dancers begin to filter in, stage lights trailing in their wake. Eventually, in the audience’s captivated silence — Russians, it would appear, are near religiously respectful towards Tchaikovsky — there is the soft sound of the shuffle of feet on the carpeted floor next to the fifth row. A heavyset man, mid-forties and balding, in a bespoke tuxedo, sits next to Napoleon.

‘Agent Solo.’

Napoleon sighs. ‘If I knew you were going to announce it,’ he says in Russian, ‘I’d have saved you the trouble and just painted a target on my back.’

‘My name is Zakharov.’ As if Napoleon did not speak at all. Not very nice, he thinks, and settles in for an entertaining evening of verbal sparring and provocation. Working alone without a conveniently stiff-backed Russian around, he was beginning to get bored. Zakharov shoots him an unimpressed look. ‘We were briefed about your unruly mouth.’

‘Is that the royal we?’

‘Are you enjoying the ballet, Mr Solo?’

‘I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur,’ says Napoleon, with a small nod towards the stage, ‘but yes, it’s very pleasant. Would be more pleasant without the gun you’ve got pointed at my balls. Your stealth is appalling, you know.’

Zakharov gives him an unsavoury, sharklike grin. His grip on the gun, inexpertly hidden by his own libretto, does not waver. ‘If I were to pull the trigger, the fact of your untimely demise would never make it out of this hall, much less the Bolshoi. Stealth is overrated.’

‘Agree to disagree.’

Something impressive is happening on stage. The lights flicker, the music swells. Next to Napoleon, Zakharov shifts, for a moment focussed entirely — or, at the very least, seemingly — on the ballet. If it’s a test, it isn’t a very sophisticated one: even if he wanted to, Napoleon would rather not kill any of his new employers in a crowded concert hall full of Russians with their patriotic spirits quite high.

‘You have the information, yes?’ Zakharov says, eventually.

‘Good god, you people undervalue subtlety. Would I be here if I didn’t have it?’

Zakharov fixes him with a flat stare, attention now fixed squarely on Napoleon. ‘Let us get something out of the way. Your reputation precedes you, Mr Solo.’

‘Flattering.’

‘Your morals were always known to be…flexible.’

‘Not only my morals, but go on.’

Zakharov grits his teeth. ‘As per our orders, you dispatched your superior. This makes us wary of trusting your loyalty, you understand. There will be a trial period. There will also be questions. Now, come peacefully. Resistance is inadvisable, Mr Solo.’

‘Oh,’ says Napoleon, fingers beginning to itch for the slim knife he carries strapped to the inside of his forearm, ‘I was never one to resist much of anything, trust me.’

He follows Zakharov out of the fifth row, leaving in his wake only a trail of softly murmured apologies. There is a subtle difference between exhibitionism — showmanship, really, given that Napoleon doesn’t get much of a thrill out of putting himself on display, only the purely cerebral satisfaction at having a job well-done appreciated — and indiscretion. For all of his flare, _showmanship_ , Napoleon knows the value of remaining inconspicuous.

He doesn’t feel inconspicuous when he is being noticed by the entire audience and, likely, the dancers on stage, as he trails after a high-ranking KGB agent who believes that stealth is overrated.

By the time they’re walking down the front steps of the Bolshoi, the street ahead illuminated with lamps and passing cars, a sweat-like sheen of frost coating the concrete pavement, Napoleon starts to regret his decision to resist the urge to resist. Two figures detach themselves from the shadows nearer the walls of the Bolshoi, approaching at an unhurried pace. Napoleon feels a distinct, grating loss of control over the situation. He feels, to his annoyance, like a sacrificial lamb going to the slaughter of its own volition.

A black car pulls up to the curb. Its windows are tinted dark. Zakharov stops.

‘I’m coming,’ Napoleon says, loud enough to make sure the men approaching them from behind can hear, ‘peacefully. There’s really no need for theatr—’

The man on the right moves fast; not as fast as Illya would, but fast enough that the kick to the back of the knee catches Napoleon by surprise. He falls, bites his tongue on a pained grunt as his kneecaps slam into the slick concrete. The man on the left joins the first and, together, they drag him up by the arms. A third man exits the car on the driver’s side. With a small nod, he hands Zakharov what looks like a black scarf.

No, not a scarf.

Zakharov smiles. With a calm air of inevitability, smiling wider when Napoleon begins to struggle against the hands holding him firmly in place, he throws the black bag over Napoleon’s head. Everything goes dark.

‘This is only a precaution,’ says Zakharov in thickly accented English. Then, in Russian: ‘Lieutenant, if you will?’

Blinded, Napoleon can go only by touch and sound. He can hear the slide of leather against metal; gloved hand on a gun. An intimately familiar noise. If any passersby notice the commotion right in front of the steps of the Bolshoi, they know how to look elsewhere. Napoleon readies himself for the deafening crack of a gunshot followed by pain. He tries to guess where he might end up getting shot, and if it will scar.

He doesn’t expect the butt of the gun connecting with his temple. He’s out before his skull hits the pavement.

…

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ are Waverly’s first words upon awakening, and the memory comes unwanted, uninvited: Gaby’s mother hurriedly stuffing faded photographs into a small wooden box (just as faded). Her father in uniform. The suffocating shame. Her mother tried to wipe her tears unobtrusively, so that Gaby would not notice, but her wedding ring left a small scratch below her right eye. _Es tut mir leid, Gabi_.

Gaby wonders why it was her mother who apologised, and not her father — he was the one to wear that uniform and, in time, bargain ideological purity for a chance at survival; not the most noble among men — but soon enough it mattered very little. Soon enough, she was being shipped off to boarding school, to ballet school, to an internat in Dresden. A young girl could get lost in all the cold indifference of a country drowned in war crimes, the retrospective guilt of generations. Gaby wonders if that is where her penchant for machines came from, rather than state policy fostering technical education to distract from the looming threat of intellectualism and the bourgeoisie.

That morning Gaby woke to London suffocating on fog and an unkept promise of rain. The room she was assigned seemed damp enough that she was surprised to find no water crystallising on her skin, no condensation on the single window. She came into the MI6 field office overlooking Leicester Square, umbrella hanging from her elbow and knocking into her bag. The bottle green of Ms Fields’ pencil skirt signified Thursday more surely than the newspapers; she kept her outfits coordinated with a precision to match a Swiss watch.

‘Agent Teller,’ she greeted Gaby. She couldn’t have been much older than Gaby, but managed to carry herself with a stoic primness that wouldn’t let Gaby even think of her without a degree of formality.

‘Good morning, Ms Fields. Any mail for me or the boss?’

Ms Fields smiled. She did whenever Gaby referred to Waverly as _the boss_ , which was always. ‘Not today, no. Something better to look forward to than just mail, though.’

‘Oh?’

‘Mr Waverly woke up.’

Just like that. Gaby stilled, smile freezing across her lips. Further small talk flew right past her head. She took the tube from Leicester Square to Waterloo, barely conscious of the street noise and passersby. She became aware at one point of a dull pain in her right hand; when she looked down at her hands crossed in her lap, it was to realise she clenched her fists hard enough the bones of her knuckles glared a sickly white through the skin. She forced herself to relax her fists, and had to smooth down the crumpled fabric of her dress.

She was let inside the private facility where Waverly was recovering. The nursing staff already knew her.

Now, Gaby sits in a stiff-backed plastic chair stood next to the bed, and the first words out of Waverly’s mouth are, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’

He looks exhausted, which is almost hysterical, given that he spent the past three weeks in a coma. Each small movement he makes looks calculated, careful and laboured. Bandages peek out from underneath the collar of his white hospital gown. Even his voice sounds tired; perhaps the lung, the punctured lung — the lung punctured by Napoleon — perhaps it’s not enough to give him the air he needs to speak freely.

‘No,’ says Gaby. She curls her toes inwards, painfully so, instead of punching him in the face. ‘You’re not.’

He smiles. ‘No, you’re right. I’m not. It was vital that Solo’s defection looks real. We had to plan for hurt feelings. You, ah. You know everything?’

‘I found your notes. The shift cipher was a little too easy.’

‘Yes, I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t give you trouble.’

It would not do to scream, so Gaby doesn’t. She breathes out, and once she does some of the tension seeps out of the line of her back and out of the room. It feels like she’s carried it coiled inside her bones for months, now. A few days ago, the only other operative currently assigned to the Leicester Square field office, Carter, asked Gaby if she’d like to let off some steam at a firing range. Gaby thinks she might take her up on the offer.

‘Are you sure of him?’ she asks.

‘I’m as sure of him as I am of you, Gaby.’

There is a pause: for Waverly to breathe, for Gaby to collect her thoughts. She watches him shift ever so slightly, wincing as he does. She thinks over the words she’s about to say, watching their possible sharp edges before she lets them take shape.

‘You know,’ she starts, drawing Waverly’s gaze from where it started to wander; he must still be heavily medicated, ‘in ballet school I had a teacher. She used to wear very high stilettos, and when we got positions wrong, she would just…grind the heels of those stilettos into our feet. To make us better, she said. She said that pain is the most effective teaching tool. I’m still not sure I agree.’

After a moment, Waverly nods. ‘Understood, Agent Teller.’

Gaby is glad he doesn’t need a dictionary to decode her, but then, the cipher she used was as unsophisticated as his own.

‘Illya is gone. After Solo. He kept in touch at first, but he’s off the grid now.’

‘He’s not your responsibility.’

‘A lot of things that weren’t my responsibility before,’ and she raises her eyebrows as she says it, _before_ , as much of a reprimand as she’ll allow herself and nowhere near as resentful as she wishes she could be, ‘are my responsibility now. What I don’t understand is your choice of agent. Illya seems like the obvious one for a mole with the Russians.’

‘Well, this is actually one of the things Solo should, if we’re lucky, try to renegotiate.’

Gaby frowns. ‘Should?’

‘That rather depends on how charitable he’s feeling at that particular moment, doesn’t it?’

It’s Waverly’s expression, more than his words, that make Gaby’s frown deepen. There is something bleak about it. Resigned, almost, more than his usual palette of reproachful, sardonic half-smiles. Gaby asks, ‘What is he going to be renegotiating?’

‘Oh. I thought you knew. There’s a kill order out on Kuryakin, of course. He has a price on his head.’

…

In pale evening light, Mikhail’s kitchen is no more welcoming than a graveyard. With the curtains pulled back the mould and water damage are visible in the corners of the walls, as are the cracks in the ceiling and the dust-covered threads of spiderwebs moving with the air currents at glacial pace, as if underwater. Illya lets his gaze trail after them. He’s bent over stale but warm tea stood at a tiny, oilcloth-covered table in the corner of Mikhail’s kitchen. The entire decor screams _solitary antisocial male_.

The tea is in a clear glass, another reminder of home. The only difference is that the podstakannik looks cheap, compared to the nickel ones Illya remembers from his family home.

He hears the soft scuffle of feet across carpeted floor. It stops outside the kitchen, anticipatory and tense, but Illya doesn’t move. Unless Mikhail intends to kill him and hide his body in the communal first floor bathroom, somehow, things don’t have to get ugly. The Makarov pistol hidden in an ankle holster at Illya’s right calf is a comforting weight.

‘So what has this Solo done?’ Mikhail asks from the doorway. ‘Are you a bounty hunter for Moscow now?’

Illya shakes his head. He stares into his glass of tea, glad not to see his own reflection. ‘This has nothing to do with the job, I told you. It’s personal.’ He weighs the advantages and pitfalls of telling Mikhail too much of the truth. It helps that he hasn’t been active in the Russian intelligence community since barely after the NKVD was dissolved in favour of the KGB. On the other hand, Illya knows very well that information is a currency that can easily turn into a weapon. He settles on, ‘He betrayed me.’

‘It sounds like he did a fair bit more than that. I bet he ran off with your woman.’

Caught unawares, Illya barks out a laugh. It’s quick and harsh. Little does Mikhail know that it’s fully the other way around, with him and Napoleon and Gaby, with all of it. No running off; it’s Illya running, after a man no less, and to kill him. Nothing more than that. Revenge in its purest form, action to consequence: put in uncontrolled emotion, stir, watch the violence come out.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I — no. We worked together. I was stupid; I trusted him. He betrayed me.’

There is silence for a heartbeat, another, and when Mikhail speaks next it’s in a voice that is almost gentle, almost soothing. Almost, but not quite, the cadence he must have used during interrogations. During torture. ‘There can’t be betrayal without trust, Illyusha, which is why it always hurts. But does it hurt enough to justify murder?’

‘He also stole vital intelligence and shot our superior,’ says Illya, irritability bleeding into his tone.

‘Ah. Then perhaps you should have started with that, hm?’

Illya keeps his gaze fixed on the tea, the limescale residue on the inside of the glass, the stains on the oilcloth. Anywhere but the doorway, from where he can feel Mikhail’s attention focussed on his vulnerability, its display through negligence. He waits for Mikhail to tell him what they both already know, that Illya has been irrevocably compromised. Another thing the handlers in Leningrad were all keen to teach him: emotional attachment of any kind is a weakness that no operative can wield to his advantage. It can be only ever used against him.

No words of reprimand come from Mikhail. After a while, Illya senses a lack of presence where he felt the man’s assessing gaze on his back.

Once he’s alone, he breathes in and out, increasingly slow, until the roar of blood in his ears dulls to an echo. The rage tastes like bitter disappointment. Illya swallows past it.

He leaves Mikhail’s home an hour before sundown, shivering in the cold wind, a manila envelope tucked under one arm. He wonders, very briefly, if he should be on the lookout for a swift bullet in the back. He left Mikhail’s Tokarev untouched, and there is no way of knowing how much weaponry he has in the apartment. Seconds tick past into minutes, punctuated only by the crunch of Illya’s feet on fresh snow. His breath mists in the air, damp and sticky. Mikhail doesn’t kill him.

The night he spends at the train station, feeling naked and overexposed, but taken for someone not worth the trouble of robbing. Conspicuous facial scars are, in some ways, a blessing.

He takes the first morning train to Krakow, already planning out the journey ahead. Krakow to Lviv, Lviv to Minsk. A solid week before he sees Moscow, in this weather.

A solid week before he sees Napoleon. A solid week to get used to the shape of the words, ‘Napoleon Solo is dead,’ lying on his tongue and tasting of copper. It seems strangely fitting that Illya would find him on Russian soil. An American spy defecting to Moscow, mirrored by his Russian colleague choosing the West. There is poetry, somewhere, in the ruthless irony of their predicament. Illya hopes Napoleon sees it, too; he would appreciate the morbid humour, if nothing else.

He draws a clear delineation between then and now. Then, in some undefined future after the thaw, he could see himself growing to think of Napoleon as more than colleague, grudging accomplice, operative far too self-obsessed to be anything but grandiosely and infuriatingly competent in the field.

Now, he can only picture a quick death, blood on snow, a merciful knife through the ribs to the heart.

…

Napoleon comes to with a start. It brings back memories, of other rooms, other rude awakenings. The light is too bright. The restraints dig into his wrists. A lack of bitter aftertaste suggests he was not, at least, drugged. It isn’t the first time he’s woken up in unfamiliar surroundings under less than favourable circumstances. Overhead fluorescents, long narrow room with a single chair, a single desk, no windows. On the desk there is a tape player, reel already in place, and a pair of headphones. Both show signs of wear. Scratches, dust.

If he were to guess — and he hopes, with weary resignation, that his guess won’t be verified by first-hand experience — he would say the reel has a recording of something grating, migraine-inducing, distressing or all three. Children’s cries, for example. Napoleon hates the noise, and recalls the torture method from a dog-eared CIA manual on interrogations. Extracting information without leaving visible marks. Reliable psychological warfare proven more effective than cold-blooded mutilation. Drowning, tearing off nails, stress positions: all could do in a pinch, but rarely are the shaky and inconsistent results worth the mess.

The interrogation manual read, in retrospect, a lot like the AP style guide except not at all concerned with style.

Napoleon knows how it’s going to go long before anyone comes into the room. He has been on the other side of this exact equation enough times to know its components and the whole procedure by heart. To keep track of time, he hums Ella Fitzgerald to himself. By the time the door opens he’s gone through at least half a record and located two badly hidden microphones. No cameras.

The man who walks in is tall and wide in the shoulders, grim-looking and built like a lumberjack. Napoleon dismisses him as the muscle and, predictably enough, a woman follows him in. She takes small steps, hindered by a pencil skirt and heels. Nonfighter. The two seem to make a complementary set.

‘I should probably tell you up front,’ says Napoleon in English, ‘I have a very high pain threshold. Negotiation might be your best bet at this point, Ms…?’

The woman smiles. ‘Agent.’

‘Ms Agent,’ Napoleon concedes with a nod. The woman narrows her eyes.

‘Major Zakharov said you would be difficult.’

‘Come on, now. That’s just slander. I’m extremely easy.’ Napoleon lets his gaze travel from the woman’s still narrowed eyes to her thin mouth, pointed chin, modest neckline, then back up again. ‘In the right company, that is.’

The man who accompanied her shifts in the corner of the room, moving his weight from one feet to the other. His expression does not change; he simply takes the few steps separating him from the chair and backhands Napoleon, hard, across the jaw. The chair doesn’t budge — screwed to the floor, must be — but the leather restraints creak when Napoleon flexes his hands.

‘You’re right, that was rude, leaving you out,’ he tells the man. ‘Rest assured that my assessment extends to you, too.’

The man raises his fist this time.

‘Stop.’

They both turn to look at the woman. Napoleon raises his eyebrows expectantly. She pinches the bridge of her nose and says with thinly contained irritation, ‘Stand down, please, Sergeant. We are not _animals_ , there is no need for blood. I would simply like to hear your report, Mr Solo. Ascertain good will and cooperation, yes?’

‘I find it highly unlikely that you haven’t heard my report through the gossip grapevine yet. Spies are barely a step above schoolgirls. I have the requested intelligence secured in a place you won’t get to unless I’m alive and, within reason, free. My test of loyalty was supposed to be Alexander Waverly. Unless your network is severely impaired, you should know that he’s currently in a coma.’

‘But alive.’

‘Yes, well, the mission parameters didn’t specify degree of injury. I decided to go with moderate-to-severe. One moderate, one severe. Next time, I’ll be sure to make it a headshot and save us all the tedium of…whatever this is.’

The woman nods, a small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. She gracefully accepts the explanation for the dig at her organisation’s incompetence that they both know it really is. ‘Next time,’ she says, ‘your order will be more specific, Mr Solo. It is hoped you will perform just as well. I cannot let you go free yet, while we are still corroborating information you sent us ahead of arrival.’

Napoleon mirrors her smile. ‘I can’t say it’s the first time a highly skilled agent has left me tied to a chair. It probably won’t be the last.’

‘Please do not antagonise Sergeant Suvorov.’ She nods at the man who, Napoleon has begun to suspect, might be there to keep her safe from him in case he tries to cut out the middle man and snap her neck. ‘You will have opportunity to refresh soon. I have one more question.’

Napoleon nods at her to go on. Throughout the whole preliminary interrogation — he’s certain this is just the first taste of what’s to come — he’s managed to avoid looking at the tape player, at the headphones. He is still trying to decide whether the torture room decor is meant to intimidate him, or its lack of usage to put him at ease. Both, most likely.

The woman reaches into a thin folder and pulls out a single sheet. Photograph, printed on glossy paper. She places it on the desk and slides it across so Napoleon has a perfect view of the grainy black and white picture of a man, caught at three-quarter profile. The face is blurry, but not blurry enough. The scar is unmistakeable.

Or perhaps he would just recognise it anywhere.

‘Did you know that you were being tailed?’

‘Oh,’ says Napoleon, airy and dismissive, unconcerned. ‘No.’ He keeps his jaw from clenching. He looks up from the picture, shrugging as much as his restraints will allow. The odds that the KGB would believe him if he said he’d never laid eyes on Illya before are slim, but if Illya decided to follow him — and whatever for? — he can’t have expected that Napoleon would protect him. Napoleon rolls his shoulders, and rolls with the punch. It’s one of the things he is very good at. ‘Well, that’s inconvenient. He’s like a puppy that way, very easily attached.’

‘Then you should keep this particular dog on a short leash, Mr Solo.’

‘We’re still in the housebreaking stage. It’s a process.’

‘This photograph was taken two days ago in Minsk. Agent Kuryakin has retraced your steps from Lisbon. We believe he will arrive in Moscow within another three days. You know, of course, that as far as we are concerned, he is a traitor to the Soviet Union. On Russian soil he is a wanted man.’

Something in the tone of her voice makes Napoleon look up from the picture, back at his interrogator. She catches his eye. It’s nothing more than a swift, vague sense of approaching doom; nothing more than a feeling of spider legs dancing across his spine, light as feather but viscerally unpleasant. Napoleon doesn’t let his expression change, and waits for the woman to drop the other shoe, even if it is an axe.

‘You wished to have specific orders, Mr Solo,’ she says, smiling slowly. For the first time since she walked into the room, she looks fully in control of the situation. She taps the picture of Illya with an index finger. ‘Here is your target.’


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since this instalment is probably the lowest point of the story, I wanted to remind anyone reading that this fic is a ‘chose not to warn’ experience. The violence tag comes into full effect here, and the level of violence both depicted and referenced exceeds canon levels. Look: bad things happen to good characters. Bad things happen to Illya in particular.
> 
> This chapter owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Ceredin, who was very kind and polite when she told me the last part was shit and needed rewriting, to Febricant, who backseat wrote all of the best parts, and to Gamble, for the darkest timeline. [drops dead bird on doorstep] 4 u guys.

In the old world, the world half-made, all children knew stories about wolves. The stories told of daring and foolish bargains, the naivety of a girl believing her keeper might stroke her face with deft clawed paws, the triumph of cunning. Once you walk into the woods, you might never come back out. In all the stories that all the children knew, it was the wolf who lost. Caught, contained; at best, remanded to the liminal horizon of dusk-flecked wilderness. Killed, at worst. Flayed and skinned, teeth pulled out.

In the new world, an old story written anew to accommodate the revolution would go: a foolish boy, daring and unafraid, would tempt fate. A wolf would come out of the woods, grey flanks heaving. The story would still end with the wolf caught and contained, snatched by the tail and remanded to a cage of the boy’s design.

In the new world, the civilised world, the better world, Illya was not bred to be contained. He carries the wilderness inside him, poised to smell fear. The new world made him. His cage is of the revolution’s design.

The dramatic irony comes not with the realisation that he has been the wolf all along; he has known that from the first quarter of blood he had spilled in the service of something larger than himself. The twist comes with the realisation that his story is not one where the wolf is simply contained, but one where it is flayed.

…

Illya cannot stop thinking of what Mikhail told him in Spandau. Mikhail’s smooth voice concealed the ragged edge of a predator’s smile as he latched onto a weakness only to have all the confirmation he could need from Illya’s instinctive recoil at being known, being seen. Visibility is openness is vulnerability is death: this is a lesson he has absorbed into every cell of his body, not only the conscious mind. In the game, to be weak is to carry a death sentence writ large across one’s back.

If he did not offer his trust, the betrayal wouldn’t hurt. If he did not trust, he would not be hurt. If he did not —

He thinks of it, still, when he gets off the train in Moscow. Snow has settled in early this year, crisp and soon trampled into mud, and Smolenskaya Station is crawling with the staggering feet, cold hands and sticky breath of people bundled up in layers of fake furs from state department stores. Illya moves between them removed by a degree, passersby parting to give him space. He has been taught not to avoid eye contact. The residents of Moscow have been taught, by collective trauma and hereditary fear, to avoid looking people like Illya in the eye.

They can spot KGB in a crowd by gut feeling alone: a gaze too keen, attention too curious, posture too slick and unbroken. Unwarranted safety by those that deserve it least, through action and devil’s bargain. The residents of Moscow can spot a wolf.

Illya only ever learned to spot the wolf in the mirror, and in fellow KGB. He could acknowledge a fellow predator in Napoleon. He did not fully recognise it; he did not recognise his own compromise. He offered his trust like a lamb offers its throat to the knife.

If he did not care, the betrayal would not have flayed him.

…

It takes him two hours to spot the tail.

…

He only notices the woman because of her hair, thick, cut at shoulder length. She is tall, but not the tallest among passersby. Thin, but not the thinnest. If anything, she is only noticeable by the degree to which she does not stand out. Features defined by an inoffensive pleasance. The cut of her hair was fashionable in 1953; that is where — when — Illya recognises it from.

She only carries a superficial resemblance to a woman Illya remembers from ten years prior, and none to his mother. It is enough to catch his attention. From then on, her subtlety and stealth lose all meaning. Illya would not be able to keep her out of his focus, not once he has smelled blood in the water and not until he knows whose blood it is.

He straightens the collar of his jacket and leads the woman down the winding streets of the city of his birth and rebirths and the _petites morts_ he’d survived since his country demanded that he serve. The jacket is conspicuous and insufficient for early winter, here of all places, but Illya never had trouble with the cold. Stiff limbs, numb fingers, expression frozen into marble: all useful, when he has not been allowed the use of painkillers or anaesthetic from the age of thirteen. He killed a man once, in Moscow in winter. The man was a defector and Illya was not yet been granted the privilege of a firearm, not even a Makarov, so he beat the man to death with his bare hands.

He leads the woman following him on a merry chase, tension rising and falling in time with the beating of his heart. She is good: he only manages to lose her in a crowd of construction workers leaving their posts for the five o’clock shift change. Illya ducks behind crumbling plaster and stray piping, retraces his steps unseen. A few minutes later he hears dog-whistling and a laughing invitation from one of the workers, to help keep the lady’s ungloved hands warm.

Illya is the one tailing her, then. The line of her back is curved like the ribs of a violin, and just as rigid. She passes a dark alley, its gate open and the raw smell of sewage present even in the cold. She doesn’t see him until the last possible moment, and by then it is too late. Illya quickens his pace until he walks directly behind her, step for step. He wraps one hand around her neck and pulls her into the alley.

She goes for a knife; Illya grabs hold of her wrist and slams it into the wall. The knife falls out of her hand. When his fingers tighten, she lifts both hands to the level of her face, palms open, their backs pressed to the wall.

‘They send little girls now?’ he asks, even though he knows the answer, and the answer is that they do and always have sent little girls to kill. The woman before him, he can see up close, can’t be older than twenty-two. Her eyes are wide, skin pallid against the greying brick, no trace of the healthy flush of cold cheeks.

‘I’m not here to take you in, Captain Kuryakin. I just wanted to get to you before the rest did. Your description — they circulated it at headquarters this morning. Top priority. To be taken alive for questioning. They say treason. I hope they’re right.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Lieutenant Afanasyeva.’

‘Your name,’ Illya repeats, with more force. He has never bothered to learn to modulate his voice for gentleness. When it does not come naturally, he relies on weight to give it the meaning he needs.

She looks at him, momentarily confused, as if no one has ever asked for her name and not meant her rank. Illya can’t blame her; the feeling is familiar. Gaby and then Napoleon were the first people to use his first name in years. Afanasyeva swallows around the fingers wrapped around her throat with only enough room to allow her a shallow breath and says, ‘Margarita.’

‘What do you want?’

‘If you really are a traitor, then I want to help you not get caught.’ When Illya tilts his head, brows knitting, she lifts her chin. A small gesture of childish mutiny, not yet beaten out of her thin frame. In another two years, her rough edges would be made into polished steel. ‘I’m a trained sniper, and they have me — they have me fucking strange men for information. I want to trade that information. I want to defect.’

The words are unexpected enough that Illya’s grip loosens. Margarita takes advantage of his surprise, getting a more solid foothold and pushing him back with both hands.

‘I’m not a traitor,’ says Illya, slowly, realising the lie in the same instant that the words slip off his tongue and hang suspended in the crisp winter air. It’s his turn to swallow, convulsive and dry-mouthed. He does not think about rings of bruises around the thin, graceful wrists of a piano teacher. He does not think of his mother’s hands. ‘I didn’t do what they think I did. But I can help you get out.’

Margarita stares at him. She stares at him for so long he begins to wonder if she understood him at all, but then her expression becomes opaque and shuttered and she turns her face away.

That is when Illya sees the microphone curled, comfortable, in the shell of her exposed ear.

A car pulls up at the mouth of the alley, then another. Illya hears them distinctly, cough of engines and creak of tires on the frosted-over street, even as he hears his blood swell into a dull roar. He takes a step forwards, then another, in the direction of the alley’s exit: hands fisted at his sides, propelled by nothing more than fury. He fell for the oldest gambit in the book, the wounded animal, a gambit he’d used himself as a rookie. He fell for it.

Five men exit the cars.

The next mistake Illya makes is that he focusses on the men. He doesn’t hear Margarita moving to take a position directly behind him until it is too late. A soft crack, rush of air. Tranquilliser gun. It hits him square in the centre of the neck, an inch below the hairline, a dose calculated perfectly to minimise collateral damage he might cause: Illya takes only two more steps forwards before vertigo brings him to his knees.

The last thing he sees is a man in a black coat entering the alley, and a wig — thick, brown, cut at shoulder length — landing in an ungainly heap next to his face.

His last thought is of Margarita’s voice, a fresh memory, and the words: _taken alive for questioning_.

Then, blackness.

…

They drag him out of the cell at a time Illya’s body insists must be no later than three in the morning on an unspecified day. He doesn’t know how many he lost in the initial drugged haze. There are no windows in the part of the compound where the prisoners are kept, the only source of light bare bulbs directly overhead. Their light is a dirty orange that lends all surfaces, steel to concrete to flesh, a sickly yellowish pallor. The blood and dirt clinging to the creases in his skin look equally brown; veins and tendons in his hands and bare feet stand out, as if resigned and submitting to the butcher’s knife.

He has been resigned and submitting from the moment of his capture, fully aware that to struggle would only hasten his death. The agents tasked with bringing him to the compound knew most of his tricks. One, Illya was almost certain he had met before in training. The operative avoided making eye contact.

As soon as the drugs wore off, he was taken to a large room tiled from floor to ceiling. It was then that Illya first realised he had been taken to a warehouse of some kind. Industrial. Unused. A faint metallic smell lingered in the air, and in the open-space washroom the cracks in the tiles were filled with old rust that might not have been rust. At that point, Illya’s bloodied clothes were taken and two men held him down as a third cropped his hair, using scissors so rusty they broke skin just as often as not.

‘Lice,’ the man explained. Illya was glad not to be standing on his own, or his legs would have given out: they cut his hair for sanitary reasons, then, not electrocution. The relief set his teeth on edge, and he bit the inside of his cheek as they hung him by the hands and hosed him down with freezing cold water. His blood left a copper aftertaste in his mouth, but he did not lose consciousness.

He was not given his clothes back.

He remains resigned and submitting as he’s dragged from his cell at what feels like three in the morning. The guards are different than those who brought Illya in. Rotation, or night shift. They do not speak. The only sounds are the creak of their boots on concrete floors, the soft shuffle of Illya’s bare feet, the clatter of his handcuffs and, somewhere distant, dripping water.

There are no stairs that he can see, or surveillance equipment. Twisting, winding corridors all blend into one in the absence of distinguishing marks. Illya assumed that he had been taken to a detention camp, the same kind that his father had spent two months in before being sent to Lefortovo. Now, he starts to rethink that assumption. He has yet to see a single camera. He has yet to see, or hear, a single other prisoner. It is customary, in his experience, to let detainees hear their nominal compatriots’ screaming and begging, whether real or staged. In the past days, Illya only had silence and cold for company.

After thirteen minutes during which Illya is certain he has seen at least one corridor multiple times, the soles of his feet aching and the handcuffs chafing his wrist through their refusal to absorb his skin’s heat, he registers a new sound. It’s a low hum, monotonous like white noise, but less grating. Not part of the routine. It gets more pronounced the closer he is led and, finally, the guards bring him to a sliding steel door.

Illya turns when he hears approaching footsteps, lighter than the guards’ boots. The corridor is badly lit, but does nothing to obscure the newcomer’s long black coat, black fedora, and stark mouth frozen in distaste. Illya pulls against the handcuffs, right foot moving forward of its own volition. He forgets that he is naked, shivering and sweating at the same time from exhaustion, from a dulled but constant readiness to die at a moment’s notice.

He was ready to die. He is not ready to see his handler. His breathing comes quicker.

Oleg barely spares him a flat look. Unhurried, he makes his way over. With every step he takes, Illya wants to take a step back. He can only watch as Oleg fishes out a ring of rusted keys out of the pocket of his coat, opens the lock and pulls, hard, at the handle. The door slides open with a subterranean howl and freezing air hits Illya like a wall of ice. His breath turns into white, damp mist.

The next thing to hit him is realisation: he hadn’t been taken to a detention camp. He’d been taken to a meat processing warehouse.

The space revealed behind the now-open door is enormous, its far wall disappearing in shadow even when Oleg flips an ancient switch and fluorescent lights above stagger into life. They illuminate row after row of bled and gutted pig carcasses strung up upside down, all frozen stiff. Even above the air numbing his nostrils Illya can smell faint traces of blood. He could smell them in the washroom, and his cell.

There is a high-backed chair stood between the centre rows of dead pigs, with leather restraints and a leather collar. It is not frosted over. Someone must have brought it in recently.

Illya starts to struggle.

He is tall, and under any other circumstances he would be the best hand-to-hand fighter present. As it is, his muscles are stiff and he wasn’t given food in three days. One of the guards yanks him backwards by the chain of the handcuffs. Another kicks Illya’s legs out from under him, so that when he falls, full weight on his arms, his shoulders are wrenched back almost out of the sockets.

It could be 1953 again, different place and time but the same terror; the same crippling, all-consuming knowledge of what is to come. Illya bruises his knees painfully on the bare floor but still tries to put up a fight as he’s dragged to the chair, then pushed into it. The déjà vu is nauseating, even though he was seventeen the last time. Then, instead of the faint smell of pig carcasses, it was human waste and fear, a distinct prison smell.

Restraints go around his ankles and wrists. The collar goes around his throat, then gets fastened to the back of the chair; to lean forward would choke him. It is more effective than it would be to restrain him by the shoulders.

Oleg watches the ritual with an unchanging displeased twist of the mouth and, after it’s done, does not watch the guards leave. There are at least two more people outside the room, other than the guards. Someone whose shoulder, clad in a grey coat, is only just visible through the doorway; someone else walking away. No other noises, save for the generators and the crinkle and crack of freezing and warm air meeting.

The placement of lights, directly overhead, throws every crease lining Oleg’s face into stark relief until he looks fifteen years older. It does nothing to soften his features, and then he is leaning in. Illya tips his head back, skull pressed to the back of the chair, to maintain eye contact. The collar bites into his adam’s apple, undoubtedly leaving bruises.

‘I raise you from your family’s shame,’ says Oleg. His breath mists in the air and he lifts one hand to cup Illya’s cheek, nicotine-stained fingers like electricity on Illya’s overheated skin. ‘I give you a reason to live and be useful, and not just a worthless waste of space and resources. This is how you repay me?’

Illya tries to shake his head, but cold fingers dig into his cheekbone, keeping him still.

‘You disobey orders. You destroy invaluable intel. You betray your country. Did you think no one would know?’

‘I didn’t —’

‘Your failure was inevitable, but I still hoped,’ Oleg says, stroking Illya’s face, voice and touch both gentle. ‘With time, your service could go towards a shortened sentence for your father. Now he’s going to die in a camp, knowing his only son bargained his life for —’ his lip curls in disgust ‘— trinkets or money or American promises.’

Illya makes a noise like he imagines wounded animals must sound like right before they die. He leans into his handler’s touch. ‘I didn’t. Sir, please.’ He is aware of the futility of begging, or asking Oleg for a stay of execution. Illya never once got what he asked for. Instead, he got what he either needed or deserved. With this in mind, despite the erratic beating of his heart and ten-year-old memories threatening to make his vision go red, he tips his head to the side so that Oleg can trace the line of his jaw — then, the line the collar marks across his neck. A noose, in a clear promise of the real thing.

Without warning, the branding iron of Oleg’s hand is gone. Illya opens his eyes, belatedly realising that he’d let them fall shut. He shivers in the pallid fluorescent light. The hair across his forearms stands on end.

‘It’s going to take another week or so for the order to be given,’ says Oleg. He steps back. Outside, someone clears their throat. Male, adult, nonsmoker. Illya registers the details with a detached and barely present part of his conscious mind, gaze fixed on his handler, who continues: ‘Then, you will be made a lesson to future recruits. It would be a waste of a killing, otherwise. But until that time, there is still information we need.’

‘There’s no —’

‘Of course there is. And before you become a lesson, you will be a test. You’re not the only one with an unreliable grasp of loyalty.’

With that, Oleg turns on his heel. Illya realises, with a start, that he has never seen the man’s back before. Now he turns without pause. In its sheer simplicity, the gesture is more humiliating than anything Illya has taken thus far: the nudity, starvation, and now the freezing room filled to the brim with a visceral, primal abjection embodied in the hung carcasses, the subtle but pervasive smell of blood and meat. Shame — and helplessness, and finality — threaten to choke him more surely than the collar.

He watches Oleg’s retreating back. In the doorway, Oleg turns halfway to the man in the grey coat whose shoulder Illya can only just see.

‘Marking is acceptable,’ he says in English, a grating resonance whiplash into round consonants and flat vowels, ‘but killing is not. If you worry about fingers, toes — we have no use for them. We only need signed confession. Take your time.’

The man in the grey coat enters. For a blessed quarter of a second, the off-white cloud of his breath obscures his face, and then Illya sees red.

…

The view from the balcony is of low limewashed buildings scattered across the edge of a sharply sloping caldera like flecks of dust caught in the sun, and the Aegean sea in all its searingly, improbably azure glory. The novelty factor has not yet worn off for Illya, and he maintains a sunrise swimming routine half out of habit and half out of a need to make certain that the blue, the sun, the volcanic sand are all real and tangible. That colours like these exist in nature, and prolonged exposure won’t render him blind. Or rather: that he deserves to look at them without being stricken blind.

His ribs are still aching from the mission, getting shot at while dragging an unconscious Napoleon — drugged by their host for the night, who also confiscated the majority of his clothes, which Illya did not feel like going back for — across the parking lot, a pack of rottweilers nipping at their coattails and Gaby gesticulating wildly behind the wheel of the getaway car. The mission, as many of theirs were wont, was a disaster. A successful one, as all of theirs were, but a disaster nonetheless.

Waverly needed only one look at their ungainly trio. ‘Right. This is — well. I believe,’ he said, bridge of his nose pinched between thumb and index finger, ‘that it might be beneficial, at this juncture, to offer you a chance to cool your heels.’

The next morning, they were on a plane to Santorini. Now, Illya climbs the sun-warmed steps towards their shared rented house. He has not bothered to bring a towel, but his skin is already pleasantly dry. In the past weeks it has gained a copper tan, save for an inch circling his wrist, pale from the watch.

The house is empty and cool, filled with fresh midday air. Gauze curtains stir in the breeze. Even here, Illya can hear the faint sound of the sea across black sand, waves crashing into cliffs. It would be unreal, if it were not undeniable. He makes his way to the balcony, with its white wicker chairs and hanging baskets of bougainvilleas the colour of arterial spray. From up there the sea looks ethereal, a layer of shimmering, azure muslin catching sunlight in every crease and fold.

He walks out onto the balcony and allows himself a moment of perfect stillness to catalogue the picture before him: searing, improbable, framed in white and blue and the sun.

There is coffee on the table. There is also a bottle of Vinsanto. There is a chess board set up, untouched since last night.

Sitting cross-legged with her back to the knee-high balcony wall, Gaby is tinkering with a radio set that she bought two days prior in town. It is still not working, but she doesn’t seem upset or impatient yet. The polka dot pattern of her sundress should be blinding, but it seamlessly fits into the scene’s surreal calm, its warmth. It would shatter the mood for Illya to ask when was the last time she brushed her hair, so he doesn’t.

Next to her, Napoleon is seated with one ankle crossed over a knee, coffee cup next to Gaby’s screwdriver on top of the low wall. He stole Illya’s sunglasses and wears them now with feline self-satisfaction, immeasurably pleased by Illya’s annoyance. He is in his element like this, in this place, at every time of day: tan and defined — solid — and sprawling, with perpetually tousled hair and ready to flirt with anything that deigns to pay him the barest hint of attention. Off-duty his mouth is always crooked into a smirk, save only for the times when it is pressed to the cold rim of a wine glass.

Illya sits at the table, feeling oddly unexposed despite being the least covered. Gaby looks up at him with a smile as bright as the sun, but safer: the light she gives off is warm, but nonlethal.

‘King to g2,’ says Napoleon in lieu of a hello or good morning. Illya moves the piece as directed and takes a sip from the cup left for him. He sacrificed his queen early in the game, almost two weeks ago, and so far it has been worth it to have Napoleon give chase across the board only to find himself checked time and again — and manage to wriggle out of each tight spot. Illya commits the current positions of the pieces to memory to think about in the next few days.

Gaby slides her sunglasses up to the top of her head, spares Illya a critical once-over. ‘You’re sunburnt. This is going to hurt, you know.’

‘You can’t fault the man if he wants to suffer for his aesthetic choices,’ says Napoleon. He gestures with his free hand, vague and meaningless, and Illya entertains a fantasy of pushing him off the balcony wall, purely out of reflex. ‘Art demands sacrifice.’

Illya rolls his eyes, as does Gaby. Full expression invisible behind the unlawfully acquired sunglasses, only Napoleon’s smile gives any indication that the words are not a threat. He tips up his chin, one eyebrow raised above the rim of Illya’s glasses. Everything is a challenge, naturally; everything a game. Illya does not give him any further satisfaction and says, turning pointedly to Gaby:

‘I’m fine. But thank you.’

‘I’ll get some lotion.’ She gets up, dusts her hands off on her thighs in a charmingly unladylike, almost boyish mannerism. Little chop shop girl and none of these things, a walking idiosyncrasy.

‘No,’ says Illya as Gaby walks around the table to leave, ‘really. There is no need,’ and he cuts himself off, biting his tongue as one cool hand pats him on the shoulder none too gently. The pain is inconsequential — he did get sunburnt — but the unexpected touch, direct skin-on-skin contact, is enough to make him jump. It seems to confirm to Gaby her own point. She lets out a satisfied huff and waves off Illya’s weak protests. The click of her soft slippers is almost indistinguishable from the crash of waves far below.

‘I think,’ says Napoleon, slow and lazy and audibly delighted, ‘that she just wants to rub sun lotion all over your —’

‘Do not finish that.’

It’s the wrong answer, in that it is an answer at all. If Illya truly were trying to discourage Napoleon, he would have ignored him. It is always futile to try ignoring Napoleon, of course. He commands attention with a gravitational force. He moves, now, from his seat at the balcony wall and towards the table, following Gaby’s earlier path. It puts him at the back of Illya’s chair. He leans against it, blocking out the sun. A rustle of fabric — he’s crossing his arms over his chest.

The hair at the back of Illya’s neck stands on end. He watches the shadow the two of them throw across the balcony floor and flexes his hands on the armrests, his one and only warning, letting Napoleon see.

‘I was thinking,’ Napoleon says, ‘after I let you destroy me at chess, we really should move on to something more entertaining.’

‘If you’re bored by chess, you are not playing right.’

‘Boredom is relative. But it’s not exactly a high adrenaline live or die match, is it? And since you’re religiously opposed to playing for money or favours, how about cards?’

Illya snorts hard enough it turns into a hiccup, caught completely off-guard by the bold faced sincerity in Napoleon’s tone. It is not, naturally, real. It is far too pleased for that; Napoleon is only halfway honest when he is angry or injured and bleeding enough to slip into it by accident. But his off-duty flirtation, as easy as breathing and seemingly just as necessary for survival, is dangerously close to what he sounds like when he takes off a mask.

‘You will cheat at cards,’ says Illya, just as bland.

‘Yes. And?’

Illya is only one of the things that pay Napoleon the barest hint of attention, focussing on him like a mirror reflecting and amplifying another mirror, into infinity. It is a physical itch, the way he wants to see what will happen if he peels off one mask, if there is a leftover trace of a real human being somewhere in the marrow of Napoleon Solo’s bones or if it’s all layers all the way down.

Despite his size, his skills, and all of his training, Illya has never been one to resist the force of gravity for too long.

‘Poker,’ he says, ignoring Napoleon’s startled intake of breath. It is another lie. Napoleon couldn’t have expected not to win. ‘If you are so desperate.’

‘Am I ever.’ The shadow twists and uncoils. Napoleon moves to the other chair, reaches for Illya’s cup of coffee, pulls a theatrically disgusted face despite knowing perfectly well that Illya takes his with sugar. He regards Illya from behind the sunglasses, unreadable to the untrained eye. He asks, ‘Are you secretly a prodigy?’

It means nothing. He extends the same amount of effort into flirting with Gaby as he does with Illya. Last night he talked her into dancing on the balcony, when one of their temporary neighbours played Sinatra on a rackety gramophone. Just this once, Illya thinks. Just this once, on a balcony in Santorini overlooking the blinding azure of the Aegean sea, with blood-red bougainvilleas and tidal warmth permeating every inch of his skin, it could continue to mean nothing and no one would get hurt.

Illya lifts his eyebrows. ‘I would not deprive you of opportunity to find out. Entertaining, yes?’

‘Always,’ says Napoleon with the radiant pleasure of a child dipping its fingers in honey. He stands to follow Gaby inside, the sun having reached a point in the endless sky where staying in its insistent glare would invite the inefficient kind of lethargy.

Illya lifts his face towards the sun, eyes closed, wondering what it would take before he could even attempt to shut off the instinct in him that catalogues the precise number of steps Napoleon takes inside the house, and if either he or Gaby would still find Illya even half as worthwhile without that instinct. It is a fantasy, not even approaching wishful thinking — there is not a force in the world, not even gravity, Illya thinks, that could make him want to unlearn his instincts — but it is still warm and refreshing in its novelty. He cannot recall the last time he fantasised about anything.

He is still seeing Napoleon’s pleased smile and eyes hidden by glass as opaque as his personality long after Napoleon himself is gone.

Three months and seventeen days later, in an enormous freezer space where Illya is tied to a chair by the feet and hands and throat, the man in the grey coat enters Illya’s field of vision. The cloud of his breath clears long enough for Illya to see his face, and he says —

…

Napoleon says —

…

Napoleon is wearing a stark and jarringly somber grey coat. He walks into the freezer space obscured by a white cloud of breath before it dissipates in the cold air, careful not to brush against Oleg as he passes him. He looks the same. Put together. The coat is jarring. He didn’t choose it. Clean-shaven, no signs of wear. Clean, full stop.

Surface details register to Illya through a haze of vibrant, choking red, through the roar of blood in his ears and the pounding of his heart. Napoleon approaches him leisurely, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves as he goes. Flexes his fingers. Illya flexes his, and the restrains creak in protest, digging into the skin of his wrists deep enough that his hands go numb. Loss of circulation. Red welts. They will heal. He will get back up.

He always gets back up. It is the first fully conscious thought he has, first crack in the surface of instinctive rage. Something in his body or expression must show that, for a relative value of everything and everything being relative, he is once more capable of processing outside stimuli. When he lifts his eyes to Napoleon, having dropped his head without realising, it is to see Napoleon regarding him with open curiosity.

Illya realises, quite calmly, that he did not walk into a trap set by his people. He walked into a trap set by Napoleon, with loving care. It’s a perfect mirror of the chess game they played in Greece, except this time it was Illya who gave chase across the entire board only to be checked and mated in three moves.

The sickly fluorescent lights overhead catch Napoleon’s eyes in an odd way, giving them an impression of catlike flatness. He nods, ever so slightly. Illya keeps looking up at him, jaw clenched so tight he could not speak even if he wanted to.

The moment threatens to stretch into infinity. Illya doesn’t know, doesn’t let himself wonder, what Napoleon is seeing when he looks at him. All Illya is seeing is the limited number of escape routes from which he will have to choose to survive this, survive and kill the man in front of him. With his hands, preferably.

Someone outside coughs.

Napoleon reaches into an inner pocket of his coat and pulls out a pack of Belomorkanal cigarettes. Not a brand Illya would have expected of him. From an outer pocket he pulls out a lighter. He raises his eyebrows in a question and Illya remembers that the last time he heard Napoleon’s voice was when he was trying to kill him, weeks ago, in Lisbon.

Whatever it is his expression shows must be enough for Napoleon. He pulls out one cigarette with gloved thumb and forefinger, closes his unsmiling lips around it, lights it, inhales and breathes out smoke. Illya’s fingers and lungs both ached for it for the duration of his captivity. Now, when Napoleon offers him the cigarette, Illya leans in as far as the collar will let him. In the end, Napoleon has to put it in his mouth.

The first drag and first taste of acrid smoke go down Illya’s throat like eucharist, and he lets his eyes drift shut. It is suddenly easier to ignore the smell of meat and blood and the hum of generators. The tips of Napoleon’s fingers brush Illya’s lower lip, then inch lower, to gently tip his chin up.

‘Just couldn’t stay away, could you?’ says Napoleon, pitching his voice low, so that it does not carry. Illya opens his eyes. There is something oddly intense about the way Napoleon watches him smoke. It makes hot sweat prickle at the back of Illya’s head and cold fury uncoil in the pit of his stomach. He does not see red.

Napoleon turns over Illya’s left hand so that it lies on the wooden armrest palm-up. He traces the fragile skin there, life and heart line. One probably too short; the other probably nonexistent. He takes the cigarette out of Illya’s mouth, takes a drag himself.

He says: ‘I’m sorry. Try to stay with me, peril.’

He puts the cigarette out on the inside of Illya’s palm.

The pain is barely noticeable, but the shock of it — the absolute lack of change in Napoleon’s expression — is enough that Illya moans around his gritted teeth. It makes his fury burn brighter and hotter, the kind he knows like a second skin that never fits ill. Before he can register his own movement, the restraints are creaking in warning as he pulls against them and he is swearing at Napoleon, graphic and choked by the leather around his throat, in Russian.

‘You kiss your mother with that mouth?’ There it is: the voice of an artist at work. Napoleon pauses, tilting his head to the side. His mouth stretches in a smile he must have learned from Victoria Vinciguerra. ‘Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering where her own mouth has been. Allegedly.’

There is a spattering of laughter from the men in the doorway. Illya throws himself forward, futile and blind with the blood pounding in his ears, until his lips are numb and he has to forcibly unclench muscle after muscle, lean back against the chair, just to breathe. His neck aches. His fingertips and mouth prickle irritatingly as circulation returns.

Napoleon takes a few steps back. The performance is obvious, now, in his theatrical mannerisms and kabuki flourish.

‘You are here to talk me to death?’ says Illya. His voice comes out hoarse. ‘You won’t prove loyalty with talk, cowboy.’

‘No, I expect not. Pity, isn’t it? I did my homework, by the way. Even a censored KGB personnel file can be very illuminating. If I remember right, you did a brief stint at Sukhanovo Prison. In a training capacity, of course.’

It has been ten years, but the chair is the same. Now Illya knows why. He knows, now, who chose it.

Unmindful of the cold, Napoleon unbuttons his coat. He shrugs out of it with leisurely grace and folds it, before seeming to remember that he has nowhere to put it. In the end, he hangs the coat on an unoccupied meat hook. The fabric of his white dress shirt bunches up beneath black suspenders, lending his silhouette an intimately unmade look. Illya swallows. The sweat in the hollow of his back itches, and he is — for the first time in what feels like hours — aware of the fact that he is naked.

Napoleon rolls up his sleeves, just the right amount, to mid-forearm. Calculated precision. He looks at Illya, pops open the first three buttons of his shirt, and lets his gaze linger on Illya’s torso, then lower.

The restraints give an ominous creak. Napoleon smiles.

‘So, about that confession my esteemed employers and I need from you,’ he says, moving closer again, flexing his gloved hands at his sides.

Illya growls. ‘You are only traitor here. I will sign nothing.’

‘You will.’ Napoleon places one hand on top of Illya’s head, running his fingers across newly shorn hair. This time the touch is proprietary, almost impersonal. Illya takes in a shuddering breath. His burnt hand aches. ‘In due time. Everybody breaks in due time, and we have all the time in the world.’

Illya lets his eyes fall shut once more, gritting his teeth to keep from biting through his tongue, and thinks only of the rushing waves of the Aegean sea, its blindingly improbable azure, bougainvilleas in late summer and a chess game he was never meant to win.

He does not scream for the first forty-two minutes.

…

It unmoors him, in the particular way that only crystalline, focussed pain can. It leaves him feeling flayed, like the wolf in Prokofiev’s story: every muscle and nerve ending exposed, raw and aching. Hollowed out from the inside out, guts and bone scraped out none too gently, but, at the end of it, cleaner than he was before Napoleon sank his claws into him.

The thought comes, unwelcome, that Napoleon would make a good handler. He has the touch. The particular cadence, when he gives an order. His self-assurance has the grounded certainty of someone who knows that if he pushes the right buttons, reality will readjust itself to accommodate the status quo he demands of it, and he knows how to push the right buttons. He smiled when he pushed Illya, and his voice never lost its affected warmth, jarring for the obvious artifice it was. He talked Illya through all of it; he talked him through every step of the session.

The false note in his voice had no hint of anything underneath. Nothing to read. Illya thought himself moderately adept at reading Napoleon Solo, disassembling lies and stripping them down to component parts, even when the layers underneath were still opaque. It unmoors him, too: the knowledge that he never could read Napoleon Solo after all. He could only predict him because Napoleon made himself predictable.

With a wordless noise that is not quite a moan, Illya turns on the floor of his cell, pressing his face into the cold concrete. The cot was taken away and he was given uppers of some kind, to keep him — force him — awake.

It is only a simulacrum of wakefulness, like overexposed film. There is a moment, in the constant lightless void of the cell, where he becomes slowly aware of another presence: someone kneeling over him on the floor. Illya turns onto his back only to be met with a warm, dry hand cupping his face, familiar voice telling him to close his eyes. The touch is familiar as well, though it would not have been a day earlier. Illya knows it by cadence, now, with or without gloves. It broke him with the same gentle insistence. Napoleon checks his pupils, wipes the sweat from his forehead. Cleans the cigarette burn on his hand and bandages it, quick and deft, and then is gone.

In the next moment of awareness Illya is still lying on his side, face still pressed to the concrete. He is not, he tells himself, disappointed.

He could not say how many hours he spends in the cell before there is noise in the corridor outside. Three pairs of boots, one lighter than the others. However many hours it has been, it’s not enough. Illya is not ready for another session yet.

The bolt in the door moves with rusted stubbornness. The hinges creak like something dying.

A thin beam of light falls into the cell, illuminating dirt and dust and the stark grey of the walls and floor. Even before his eyes adjust, Illya is moving to the corner farthest from the door. He has no weapons save for his hands, his height and weight and negligible momentum the space of the cell could afford him. He plants his feet a shoulder width apart and presses his back against the wall.

‘Hold him down, you two,’ comes Napoleon’s bored drawl. He is overacting. Illya curls his hands into fists. Three shadows resolve themselves into distinct shapes, colour and sharpness bleeding into Illya’s vision until he can make out details. The guards are armed, clad in full tac gear. Napoleon has not put his coat back on, and his sleeves are still rolled up. In profile, he could be stood on a plinth in the Louvre.

‘Don’t want dirty hands, Amerikanskiy? Kapitan say, no killing.’ Despite the warning, both guards obediently come inside, making a straight if cautious line for Illya.

‘Did he say that, really?’

Outside the cell Napoleon slips off his shoes and follows the guards in, moving soundlessly. He shakes his head when Illya lifts his gaze to him. Illya’s breathing quickens. One of the guards reaches for the pair of handcuffs strapped to his belt. The other hangs back, hand hovering inches from his thigh holster. They both move slowly, attention focussed on Illya as if dealing with a rabid animal. Their wariness would be funny, if Illya had it in him to laugh. Instead he breathes in.

The first guard is in close range when Illya raises an eyebrow at him, cocking his head to one side.

Napoleon takes the few steps separating him from the second guard. The man starts to turn. Napoleon moves behind him, grabs him by the chin and hair and snaps his neck, then yanks his gun from the holster before the body can hit the ground. By the time the second guard turns, giving his back to Illya, the safety is off and the gun is pointed squarely between his eyes.

‘Strip,’ says Napoleon. He, the guard and Illya make an uneven triangle in the dank cell. The guard must look confused, or possibly angry, because Napoleon’s lip curls in distaste. ‘I don’t feel like undressing a corpse later. Take your clothes off.’

From behind, Illya covers the guard’s mouth with his hand and takes one of the knives crossed at the man’s back. Gives him a quiet death, through the ribs and to the heart.

He lays the body on the floor without taking his eyes off Napoleon, aware that there is now a distinct trail of blood across his torso. He flips the knife to hold it in reverse grip.

‘The gear without blood on it isn’t in your size,’ says Napoleon, ‘but beggars can’t be choosers. Entertainment value aside, you’re not walking out of here naked.’

Illya steps over the guard he killed. He hears himself breathing; he hears the roar of blood in his ears, like the distant toll of church bells echoing in the confined space of his ribcage. Napoleon narrows his eyes.

‘Illya,’ he says, slowly, but he has no time to lift the gun before Illya is on him. He uppercuts Napoleon in the throat, knees him in the solar plexus, manages two precision nerve strikes that must be enough for Napoleon to lose feeling in his legs. Napoleon repays him by catching him on the jaw, in the side, managing to trip him up. It is not graceful. The knife clatters to the floor, unused and stained with someone else’s blood. Soon, it’s joined by the gun falling out of Napoleon’s numb fingers.

Despite Illya’s exhaustion and injuries, Napoleon is still slower. He goes down with one fist to the kidney, gasping as he falls to his knees; then, another directly to the face, and he drops with a wet moan and a meaty crunch of bone and cartilage. It is not enough, and the red colouring Illya’s vision does not subside. The tidal wave of rage, leaving behind scorched earth, as intimate as now Napoleon’s touch is, when his fingers press against any of the points in a human body that ruin without leaving a mark.

Illya feels marked to the very bone, branded in the way of a beast of burden. He wants to brand in return. It has been years since he last beat a man to death with his bare hands, but nothing else will do, and the knowledge is the only coherent thought in his entire mind. All else is white noise; all else is a white-hot, screaming wilderness that he does not bother to contain.

He becomes aware, suddenly, that Napoleon is not fighting back.

He becomes aware, as he breathes through his nose, loud and laboured, that there is a bandage wrapped around his right hand. He blinks at it with arrested realisation. The fabric is stained with Napoleon’s blood, dirty from Illya having slept on it. He thought he hallucinated it. He thought it was the drugs that made him dream of a warm, dry touch on his face.

Reality shifts, adjusts, settles. Illya clenches his jaw tight enough he thinks his skull might crack in half. There is drying blood on his chest and fresh blood on his hands. A gun on the floor, next to a knife.

Illya rolls off of Napoleon, breathing as heavily as if he ran five miles. He moves to lean against the wall and watches Napoleon try to sit up.

Napoleon’s voice has no colour or cadence when he says, speech slurred by the blood in his mouth, ‘I deserved that.’

‘Tell me why I should not kill you.’

‘I’m your best chance at getting out of Moscow alive,’ says Napoleon, looking at Illya with too-bright eyes. His hair is imperfect, meticulously rolled up sleeves now spattered with his own blood. His broken nose has already started to swell. ‘You don’t have all the information. I’m not,’ and here Napoleon winces, having pulled at his split lip, ‘this time, I’m not a traitor. Ask Waverly when we get out of here. He sent me here. Double blind.’

‘Convenient. Only person who can corroborate your story is comatose.’

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says, slower, careful. He is not overacting. His tone, if anything, is understated. A muted facsimile of emotion. ‘I didn’t betray you.’

The words should be flippant. They should obscure an obvious, glib lie. It is why he so often avoids declarative statements: plausible deniability and games, always the games. Now, despite having checked Illya into a corner, he forfeits. Illya knocks the back of his head against the wall, hoping in vain to rattle loose a decision. Light falling in from the corridor across Napoleon’s slumped-down figure and the dead guards still throbs in time with Illya’s heartbeat, but the red tinge is bleeding away.

‘I didn’t,’ Napoleon repeats.

‘Convince me,’ says Illya, and grits his teeth before forcing himself to stand up, using the wall for support. ‘We get out of here, I call Gaby. One wrong move —’

‘I know.’

If Illya did not care, the betrayal would not have flayed him. And there, the irony of it, of the entire laughable ordeal. He cares, still, even now. He never stopped. Perhaps it will be easier to react to Napoleon if the only thing he takes as granted is his unpredictability. Illya’s story was never meant to be one of containment. He has yet to see the moral of it through, even if it is one that he has always known: once you walk into the woods, you might never come back out.

Illya does not close the dead guard’s eyes before taking his tac gear.


	4. Chapter 4

Dawn is starting to paint the horizon the colour of freshly bruised skin when they leave the warehouse. The air outside is as cold as inside, but fresher, not as suffocatingly stale, and that is enough for Napoleon to allow himself a moment to breathe in and out. Lungs expanding and contracting, he winces in badly concealed pain. Cracked ribs get no more pleasant through practice and repetition.

No guard stirs at their departure. Napoleon made sure to time everything down to the second: shift rotation converging with a card game staged, conveniently and with purpose, in the security locker room. At his back, Illya is moving with the single-minded purpose of a man struggling with both pain and medicated grogginess. His trajectory is too even, a straight line connecting the point A of his cell to whichever point B Napoleon might lead him.

The resigned compliance and the defeat with which he makes himself follow Napoleon cut strangely and unexpectedly deep. Napoleon might describe it as humbling, in anyone else, were he inclined. He isn’t. He only wishes that things could have unfolded differently from the moment Waverly first approached him about the mission. He tastes blood in his mouth and feels it trickling down his throat, face long gone numb from the throbbing ache of broken nasal bones, and wishes Illya would have at least broken an arm as well. It might have put them on more equal footing. It might have made things easier.

Illya still has the gun. Napoleon granted him the tactful mercy of turning away instead of watching him strip the dead guard, but he knows perfectly well that Illya took all of the man’s knives, too. He has more weapons on him than Napoleon, even discounting the functionality of his weaponised body. If he did not need shoes, he might use the laces as garrote wire, though they are a far cry from the sleek comfort of Berluti.

By now, surveilling the ways in which Illya could kill him has become a routine thought exercise.

Neither of them speaks. The only sounds are their breathing — Napoleon’s harsh and noisy around the swelling and misaligned cartilage — and the crunch of snow beneath their shoes. From time to time, the rustle of fabric. There is only so much Illya can do to move quietly in clothes that fit ill.

Napoleon hotwires a navy blue Volga belonging to one of the KGB superintendents in charge of the warehouse. In the rearview mirror he has a perfect view of Illya in the cramped space of the back, legs bent so his knees are nearly level with his chest. He takes off the tac vest as soon as Napoleon pulls out of the compound and onto the deserted northeast Moscow streets. It has snowed in the night, a fresh layer soon to be trampled by cars and passersby alike. Until then, the city will continue to look nothing short of ethereal: thick snow like spun wool covering grey concrete and human exhaustion, frost tricking the air into disregarding its pollution and smelling clean again, if only momentarily.

The city centre is less deadened, early morning pedestrians and commuters shuffling towards their very own points B. Napoleon does not risk any unwanted but probably due and deserved attention from the militsiya, driving leisurely in the slow-rolling tidal wave of nondescript Ladas and the occasional Ford.

Snow clouds slither over the sky, heavy and heaving with promise, by the time they make it to a sleepy crooked knee of crisscrossing streets. Old money and pre-revolutionary tradition hang in the air as palpably as inevitable snowfall, and Illya’s gaze slides over the passing tableau with an aged but still bright ache. Napoleon pulls up at the curb in front of a tenement block reminiscent of both castle and prison. Only a rare balcony adorns the solid sleet-grey wall of windows, opaque now and reflecting the pallor of the sky. It can’t be later than nine in the morning, but there is no one there to watch two men passing beneath the gated archway and into the wide, winding staircase with its peeling paint and cracked tiles.

Illya continues to keep a distance of four steps between them, following at an even pace. Some of the tension borne of his trying to keep himself awake and together has been replaced by a visible, almost audible exhaustion. Napoleon keeps his eyes glued to the dirty and dusty wooden floorboards as he climbs eight flights of stairs. Giving his back to Illya despite feeling like he bares his throat for a half-rabid animal is a calculated and necessary sacrifice of his own comfort; Napoleon is resigned to have to offer more of these concessions to tip the balance in his favour again, or, at the very least, nudge the scales into a relative evenness.

He would be lying, too, if he said that he isn’t curious to see what could spark into existence in the smouldering wreckage of his partnership with Illya. Give and take. Napoleon has always been more than willing to put himself in harm’s way in pursuit of an interesting, unpredictable outcome, desirable for all its unpredictability, each possible denouement equally appealing. He was allowed behind the veil, allowed to watch and react to Illya with his guard — somewhat — lowered. Now, the process of slipping back in will have to be infinitely more precipitous. The thought of it makes blood course more hotly in his veins, anticipatory and keen.

It is not without reason that Napoleon has always been most attracted to things that proved a challenge to steal.

He never had to steal the same thing twice.

Napoleon is unlocking the door to a fourth-floor apartment when there is a noise, a light scratching, and something small and swift dashes in from an upper stairwell. It is barely more than a smudge of deeper shadow, but then it twists and coalesces into the form of a dark tortoiseshell cat, tip of its tail swishing nervously across the floorboards as it stands in front of the door and fixes Napoleon with an unblinking green stare.

Without a word, Illya picks up the cat to let Napoleon open the door. It settles in the crook of his elbow, made to appear even smaller than it is when framed by Illya’s broad chest and whipcord forearms, seemingly content to let itself be carried as long as it is carried inside. ‘This place,’ says Illya, leaving the rest of the sentence for Napoleon to only guess at.

‘Safe, or as good as. It’s off your people’s radar, the CIA don’t know about it, and Waverly never asked.’

He gestures Illya inside, only to be met with a flat look, and, ‘You first.’

Napoleon obeys.

It is darker in the apartment than out on the staircase. Panels of dark wood cover the walls of the hallway, white paint yellowed and cracked with age. The ceiling is tall, only compounding a vague sense of containment. Napoleon switches the light on and it snaps at the long shadows, orange and thick. In retaliation, they only grow longer. The place is replete with furniture and art that lacks a certain clean Soviet utility, its heavy simplicity of lines. It is why Napoleon has kept it untouched, since he first got the keys. A bit of the old world in the midst of the new.

Illya tours the place exuding the same kind of palpable, weary ache with which he looked at the streets outside. Old money, old tradition; it must seem familiar, painful for its familiarity, or — well, who is to say. He strokes the cat’s long fur with surprising — and, apparently, either instinctive or unconscious — gentleness. It butts the palm of his hand and purrs in content, but save for petting it, idle and absentminded, Illya pays it no further heed. He surveys the furniture, the paintings, the heavy curtains and hardwood floors, and moves to the living room, getting stuck for a long moment in front of the bookshelves: some classics, some banned gems, an occasional Western novel.

He ignores the folded chess set tucked neatly on the shelf between a Grossman and a collection of white émigré poetry.

It starts to snow outside, white moth-like flecks clinging to the windows before shrinking into nothing. Finally, Illya turns back towards Napoleon. He looks like utter, unmitigated shit, but it provokes no more twinges of remorse in Napoleon than the sight of him barely conscious and drugged back in the cell already had.

Napoleon doubts that he looks better, in any case.

‘Telephone,’ Illya prompts. He did agree to hold off killing Napoleon until he got a chance to corroborate Napoleon’s story — the truth, it just so happens, as much merit as that might warrant.

The cat wriggles out of Illya’s hold, landing on the floor with the softest tap of paws on wood, and in its sudden absence Illya’s hands fall to his sides, curling into loose fists. Napoleon gestures with his chin to the phone stood on a dresser next to the coffee table, and regrets it immediately. The pain in his face — nose, jaw, distinct aches converging and overlapping — receded, for a time, in the cold Volga. Here, the heating is on. The air inside is half-stale with it, a nearly physical spectre that makes simple movements feel more like treading water.

He watches Illya take the phone to the apartment’s only bedroom, cord extended far enough that it is pulled taut. Illya shuts the door.

It is no small feat to grant him privacy, when every instinct, natural and self-taught and learned, tells Napoleon to listen in. He wonders if Waverly woke up; he wonders if Gaby pieced the puzzle together on her own, in the event that he did not. Napoleon does not eavesdrop. He makes no move, in fact, to come any closer to the shut — though not locked — bedroom door than he already is, and, after a moment of staring at the scratched wood, he turns on his heel.

The kitchen is not large, and it has only the barest modicum of what might pass for appliances. The day before, with Illya contained and the Russians as satisfied as they ever would be given their naturally surly dispositions, Napoleon slipped his tail and prepared the safehouse. For a given value of safe, of course, and even more immaterial meaning of house; the apartment had stood empty for the past four years, and the dusty misuse lends it a certain air of claustrophobia. Napoleon only stocked the kitchen with easily obtained nonperishables and what could be found in terms of necessities. It amazes him, still, the degree of subterfuge required in trying to buy any kind of meat.

It’s supposed to be poultry, but Napoleon knows well the texture and colour of poultry. This is not it. Given the number of stray dogs Napoleon has seen slinking, half-starved and growling, into back alleys all around Moscow, he would not be surprised — well. Cooked, it will make no difference. He checked the gas stove and, as it didn’t explode in his face, food preparation should be no more difficult than acquisition.

He makes tea. It’s not good, but it is enough to occupy his hands as he waits. The thought that if Gaby is not convincing enough over the phone, or if she did not figure out Waverly’s orders and Napoleon’s current loyalties, Illya will most likely kill him, is a remote one. It leaves him untouched, not concrete or fixed enough to pierce through the mild fog of purely physical, uncomplicated pain.

Illya did not kill him once already. Twice, counting Napoleon’s narrow escape in Lisbon. He rubs idly the long faded bruise on his adam’s apple where the heel of Illya’s palm dug into his trachea as he pinned Napoleon to the wall by the throat.

Napoleon is not, though perhaps he should have been, expecting the — crack. Like gunfire muted by the stuffing of a pillow, it reverberates through the walls and floorboards and makes the nameless cat dash out into the corridor. The noise comes from the bedroom, and it sets Napoleon’s teeth on edge without making him flinch — nothing so obvious, but enough of a reminder that his nerves are somewhat frayed by constant exposure to the Russians and their long, dragging threat of going back on their word; by the carefully cultivated non-awareness of Illya — and he waits to hear if more will come.

More does not come.

Illya, instead, comes out of the bedroom and leaves the door open and gaping, the room behind it dark. The exhaustion on his face has given way to a tension so poignant, so furiously desolate, that it gives his movements the stiff-jointed woodenness of a strung marionette. On the bedroom floor, Napoleon can see the phone receiver, broken into four pieces as it must have been smashed into the wall. There is likely a dent to be found in the plaster.

Illya says nothing, but his fury is visibly directed inwards in the same way as when he misses a shot, when he fails, and Napoleon knows that his own execution — his own inadvertent suicide by feral dog — has been postponed.

And yet, sat in one of the two rackety kitchen chairs, he tracks Illya’s passage from the bedroom with careful intent, tilting his head upwards to maintain eye contact. Jaw tight despite the bright stabs of pain it sends through his skull by way of his broken nose, ready to reach for any of the knives on the counter, or the gun taped to the inside of the sink cupboard. He makes sure to project a languid exhaustion, limbs loose, spine relaxed.

Illya approaches him without slowing down until he stands between Napoleon’s thighs. Too close, then closer: he leans forwards and takes hold of Napoleon’s face with both hands, dry and cold, peering at the damage he inflicted. The pain of having his head moved this way and that is doubled when Napoleon tries to keep Illya in his field of vision. The pads of Illya’s index fingers press into Napoleon’s temples, and the pull of skin forces open the cut above his right eyebrow.

Blood slowly oozes down towards his eye. Napoleon keeps still, displayed and open, vulnerability an unspoken offering.

Illya stares at him for one heartbeat, then another. His eyes are opaque with stamped-down emotion, ground into indecipherability. If he were to speak — but he doesn’t.

He moves his hands to bracket the front of Napoleon’s face, pressing down on already oversensitive skin, and sets Napoleon’s nose. No warning, his hands ungentle, lacking the impersonal precision of real first aid training. The bones and cartilage shift with a wet crunch, an alignment of tissue and bone that surges down Napoleon’s nerve endings until he can feel pain in each vertebra separately.

He realises the faint but harsh groan at the edges of his hearing is his own, muted by the rush of blood in his ears. Napoleon clenches his teeth and bites his tongue, but it is another moment before he can force the noise to cease. There is blood, too warm on his clammy upper lip.

There, he thinks, quite distinctly: humiliation for a humiliation. He looks up at Illya, who takes a step back and flexes his hands, long fingers curling and uncurling, and finds that the quality of Illya’s fury has not changed. Knows, then, that it has not been enough.

Napoleon stands, ignores and renewed torturous throb of pain, and spits blood into the sink.

‘Thank you,’ he says. The words are dipped in unrestrained sarcasm, but like Illya’s fury, it is the kind that faces inwards. Napoleon wipes the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His whole body feels as if he came down from a fever, cold and overheated in turn.

By the time he turns, the kitchen is empty.

…

Illya changes out of the dead guard’s tac gear and showers, all in perfect silence, and locks himself in the bedroom. He emerges once more after seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, and it is a wonder what such a short time of recovery is capable of achieving, but then, the finest specimens of healthy youth make the best killers, when trained. The pallid hue to Illya’s skin is gone, replaced with a paleness that will fade into health in time, and though his eyes are still bruised he no longer looks as if he might topple over and melt into the ground like a wax figure decomposing at the mere sight of a lit match.

He is no less wary, but he doesn’t look starved to the point of barehanded, vacant-eyed madness. He scrubbed off the scabs and old blood on his scalp, unevenly cropped hair now dry and sticking up. The plain shirt that Napoleon got him does nothing to hide the stark, vivid line of bruising across the width of his throat, still purple and blue in places, yellowing in others, offset by the dark red of broken capillaries like fresh lightning scars. Napoleon wonders if the skin there is hotter to the touch than the rest of Illya’s neck, if the abrasions generate heat as they slowly begin to heal; he wonders if, were he to wrap his hand around Illya’s throat thumb to the tip of middle finger, he could reach the edges of the bruising.

Illya’s hand is newly bandaged.

While he slept, Napoleon took the time to shower and change, too. He only left the apartment once, to gather from the Volga the documents and dossiers he had acquired before setting on a vague course for freedom. Illya’s very own KGB file is there, slipped between the pages of a freight manifest from Odessa, mostly censored with a black marker but still useful for its potential as a bargaining chip. Napoleon took it on a whim and left it with the other papers from the car. He had more pressing matters; he was bleeding over the floor, for one thing. The cat followed him from room to room, sniffing delicately at the stains, until Napoleon sat on the edge of the bathtub and, using a hand mirror, stitched the cut over his brow with brown thread and a needle cauterised over the gas stove.

Having used vodka to disinfect the thread, Napoleon did not put it back in the icebox. It stands on the table, now, accompanied by two glasses. Waiting for Illya, with the dying winter sunlight falling in at odd and bruising angles. It casts the kitchen in varying shades of indigo and rust; a dulled and curiously corpselike radiance.

Illya takes one look at the bottle on the table, at the glasses, takes the one closer to him and fills it with water from the sink. Downs it, refills it, and finally sits in the chair that Napoleon kicked out for him from where it was nestled halfway beneath the table. He sits straight-backed for only a moment before his posture comes closer to mirroring Napoleon’s careful, calculatedly lazy slouch. He runs a critical gaze over Napoleon’s face: the swelling is only beginning to decrease, Napoleon knows, as breathing remains a laborious process, complete with a faint whistle when he exhales.

Napoleon fills his own glass and takes a generous sip. The vodka, like the tea, is not good, but it perches somewhere on the precipice of adequacy.

‘What was your mission?’ Illya says.

‘Didn’t you ask Gaby?’ Napoleon cocks his head to one side, then the other, waiting to hear his cervical vertebrae pop, eyes half-shut but attention unwavering.

‘I’m asking you.’

Napoleon pauses. He traces the rim of his glass with the tip of his ring finger, watching condensation mist at the edge from the warmth of his skin. He hates settling for ‘adequate’ where ‘exceptional’ could conceivably be had. With the sigh of a man unwillingly letting go of a secret he knows would be better deflected with a merciful lie, he says, ‘KGB sleeper cells in the British government. Not our operation, technically.’

‘They could have sent me,’ says Illya, a crease appearing between his brows as he considers, not waiting for a response. ‘Unless —’

‘Just so.’ Napoleon salutes with the glass before taking another sip. It burns, pleasantly, as the liquid rolls down his tongue. It kills the clinging aftertaste of blood, if only for a moment. ‘MI5 preferred you don’t get involved. Waverly didn’t want to risk you either, given the kill order. Well,’ he amends, tipping his chin down, catching Illya’s eye before Illya turns away; an answer to the question Napoleon did not ask yet, ‘kill or capture. Same net result, really. You knew, didn’t you? After the disc, and UNCLE — you had to have known there would be no coming back.’

It is as close as Napoleon has ever bothered to raise the question of loyalty, and loyalties. He is not as interested in Illya’s answer — of course he knew about the kill order; he is smart, unfortunately so, for his particular career trajectory — as he is in the play of shadow across the planes of Illya’s face, the tension in his jaw easing and gaining in turns. It speaks far louder than any words might, and Napoleon watches, rapt, the last breaths of Illya’s determined homesickness flicker and dissipate, crucified by his self-inflicted martyrdom.

‘This place,’ says Illya, one hand twitching to encompass the whole of the apartment. ‘Where did you find it?’

Napoleon smiles. Far louder than words. ‘Ah. Four years ago. It belonged to a…well, let’s just say Gaby wasn’t my first. He left me the keys. Place comes in handy sometimes.’

‘Four years.’ Illya looks around, as if registering the kitchen and the rooms beyond through a lens of fresh understanding. ‘You were the one who got Anatoly Ovechkin across the Iron Curtain?’

‘You heard about that? I’m flattered.’

Illya shrugs, noncommittal but betrayed by the colour rising slowly across his neck, visible over the collar of his shirt. He keeps his gaze focussed on an indistinct point near Napoleon’s right shoulder; the window, perhaps, and the view outside. After months of absence he only saw Moscow for a few hours, according to the report Napoleon was privy to, before being taken. Only the concrete walls of the cell, from then on.

They both know this time it is Illya who might need safe — or, at the very least, nonlethal — passage across the Iron Curtain. Neither mentions that fact.

‘High profile extraction,’ says Illya, and adds, to Napoleon’s shock without being stricken by whatever divine power might be presiding over the two of them: ‘It was efficient work.’

Napoleon raises his eyebrows, allowing the unexpected compliment to hang in the suddenly far tenser air between them, gaining weight with each passing second. Once again, Napoleon thinks of the way Illya followed him out of the compound: resigned defeat, resigned compliance, as if once he had made the obvious choice, in terms of pure survival, to let himself offer Napoleon the benefit of the doubt, he was just as ready to accept one final game and a swift death at Napoleon’s hand. As if the choice was not logical or obvious, but a hopeful gambit predicated on the even odds of Napoleon being a traitor, and faith that he was not.

As if, having given everything in interrogation, he was willing to give his life in the event that the odds were not in his favour.

Napoleon has answers, and observation, and the evidence of Illya’s willing presence in his company. Shop talk and small talk and a freely given acknowledgement of Napoleon’s skill. He still does not know the why of it. It is maddeningly both too easy and incomprehensible, the way Illya is, an idiosyncrasy carved into a rough surface of water-beaten stone. Napoleon wants to chip away at it and see the living, beating heart underneath. He — wants, somewhat uncharacteristically. He wants to see what could happen.

He finishes his vodka in one long swallow, tilting his head so that the last of sunlight will catch the bared line of his throat.

‘It’s warmer in the drawing room,’ he says, standing up. His footsteps across the dusty tiles remain solitary, however, and when he turns in the doorway it is to see that Illya has not moved. It’s a calculated effort, then, his next words; the first and, Napoleon privately hopes, only time he has to acknowledge what happened in the KGB compound, what Napoleon did. What he saw, as well: the minuscule width of the verge that separated Illya from being broken. ‘You must still be freezing after that place. I know I am.’

He does not check to see if he’s being followed. The cat dashes out of one of the empty rooms, tail stiff as a flagpole as it pads across the hall to rub against Napoleon’s shins.

After a second’s consideration, he picks up the cat by the scruff of its neck. It goes half-limp, flat round eyes staring at Napoleon with wary forbearance, the tip of its tail twitching from side to side as it withholds judgement of Napoleon until provoked into action, and Napoleon registers idly the fine texture of the cat’s fur and the touch of long whiskers across the inside of his bare wrist where he rolled up his sleeves, the fragility of thin feline bones. Unthinking, he tightens his hold, and the cat begins to struggle, twisting its body a near perfect hundred and eighty degrees to claw at his wrist and forearm, a steady and piercing whine growing within the small jaws.

Unmindful of the scratches, Napoleon carries the cat across the corridor, unlocks the front door, and places it on the other side of the threshold.

‘A little privacy, please,’ he says, and shuts the door, locks it again. Thick wood muffles the cat’s irritated meow.

The apartment does not feel emptier when he turns back towards it, neither does it feel darker or more oppressive. No ghosts linger in its corners to breathe out dread. Nothing but the spectres brought from the outside.

Illya is already in the drawing room.

The impossible length of his limbs and spine is curled into a moth-eaten chaise longue with a grace that is equal parts effortless and unselfconscious. Ingrained, in the way of old money. He knows how to make his body behave with automatic elegance, even if the knowledge is stamped down and tampered by training. He taught himself to appear commonplace in a direct parallel to how Napoleon taught himself to appear extravagant, both their efforts invisible to the unsophisticated onlooker, but Napoleon suspects that Illya sees the fraud in him just as much as Napoleon sees the fine breeding in Illya.

He is reading. The book’s cover is invisible, shielded by where it rests against his thighs. The impression of the collar around his neck stands out darkly in the low light, undisguised and obscene.

The drawing room is, indeed, warmer, almost uncomfortably so. Illya has the lights already on, turning the bookshelves and desk and armchairs a pleasant and cosy solace for a winter’s late afternoon. It would be close to idyllic — almost, as the heat, uncomfortably so — were it only a little less fraught with lies borne out of convenience and necessity, the invisible touch of a high-profile Russian defector and the strength of Illya’s memory and familiarity leaking, sordid and bloody, into each floorboard, crevice, crack in paint. Idyllic is not the word. The air has the consistency of something thick and viscous, but not sweet.

Napoleon’s footsteps are muffled by the rug, and he does not look to see if he is being watched. Knowing would be superfluous, and would not change the quality or trajectory of his behaviour, his performance, either or both.

He turns off the light in the corridor, pulls the door to the drawing room half-shut. Undoes the first few buttons of his shirt, then the buttons of his sleeves to roll them back further, exposing the vulnerable skin inside his elbows. Already shoeless, he toes off his socks and allows himself a momentary slip in decorum by kicking them off to the side.

With the gentlest rustle of paper against paper against skin, Illya turns a page in his book.

Napoleon crosses the drawing room in long strides, unhurried but purposeful. Outside the window, the city seems painted in monochrome by an inexpert hand, all dark concrete and bright snow falling in large, sticky flakes. Napoleon studies the street for any signs of a tail or surveillance. There is nothing. He draws the curtains close and smooths the fabric, finding it dusty from misuse. Sighing, he wipes his hands over the front of his shirt. They leave marks.

He does not think of staging, as he moves across the drawing room, and thinks instead of the prickling awareness of Illya’s attention, counter to his gaze, fixed with a palpable intensity like a caress.

Napoleon stands in front of the chaise. He cracks his neck, just to see the subtle wince twisting Illya’s mouth at the sound of popping vertebrae, and lifts the book from Illya’s stiff fingers.

‘What are you,’ Illya starts, finally lifting his eyes to Napoleon. They are dark, and calm only in the way that a trapped fox might be calm in the moments when it tries to decide whether to tear its own leg off to escape. Chin tilted up to maintain eye contact, Illya’s neck is a lurid tableau of abused flesh. His wrists, too, where leather restraints dug into them, sport twin bands of angry red abrasions and skin peeled off the cresting bones of his forearms. He holds himself with perfect and disquieted stillness, poised for flight or attack at a second’s notice, tension wound into whipcord and twisting on itself; a verge, a precipice.

Napoleon sinks to his knees.

He smiles, seeing Illya struggle against the instinctive flinch, an intractable lifting of the shoulders as they grow ever more tense. And yet he moves in tandem, lowering his legs from the chaise to plant his feet on the floor.

‘What are you doing,’ he says, a full sentence this time, though perhaps the last one was full, too. He watches the fluid bend of Napoleon’s body, knees spread comfortably wide and chest flanked by the parentheses of Illya’s thighs, an obeisance paid with a taunt and a threat. Had he any room to move or breathe, Napoleon has no doubt he would be backing himself into a corner, but there are no corners here that would not come with an insinuation of another’s presence, another’s touch.

Napoleon rests his elbows on Illya’s knees, leaving his hands suspended between Illya’s thighs, and tilts his head. ‘Service for my country, let’s say.’

The room has shrunk, seemingly, cocooned by the stifling fall of snow outside and warmth leaking across the floor from the old radiators, coalescing at Napoleon’s feet and knees like oil. He uncurls his arms and drags his nails across the inseams of Illya’s trousers, up to mid-thigh, then stops. Smooths the fabric with his palms. Watches Illya’s throat work, the convulsive movement of his adam’s apple.

‘Have you—?’ Illya says, gaze dropping to Napoleon’s mouth. He forces his attention away, jaw held at such a rigid angle it is miraculous that the words managed to roll off his tongue and past his teeth at all.

‘If you’re asking if I’ve done this for a mission before—’ a flick of his tongue across his lower lip, Illya inhaling sharply; he leans back, by an increment, as if anticipating that Napoleon might go for his throat ‘—the answer is yes. If you’re asking if I’ve done this without the convenient excuse, the answer is also yes.’

Illya’s hands lie, fisted tightly enough that the knuckles are white and the veins across his palms stand out in funerary blue, across his thighs. Napoleon runs the pads of his fingers over the bandaged one — cold, as always, as if the length of Illya’s body were its own limitation, restricting the flow of blood — coaxing the tendons loose. He turns Illya’s palm over, opens the clenched fingers one by one. It is a pity that the cigarette burn is hidden, but Napoleon is no stranger to briefly shelving his own curiosity for the greater good. He leans forwards, eyes half-shut, to nose at the fabric of the bandage. It is only the barest suggestion of a touch, and the pain is brief but near blinding. Napoleon does not grit his teeth, or move.

‘Which one is now.’ A strange mixture of panic and need lurks at the edges of Illya’s voice, and it settles over Napoleon like a veil.

He says, ‘Six of one. Un petit plaisir de la vie. And I owe you. I don’t like owing people.’

He turns in the self-inflicted hold, until he can comfortably look up, face cradled in Illya’s injured palm. With his free hand, he reaches to undo the buttons of Illya’s trousers. The first one goes with all protests unvoiced, slipping open with only the barest catch in Illya’s already carefully deep breath. On the second, the fingers brushing Napoleon’s hair tighten in it, palm pressed gently to the stitches lining Napoleon’s brow, and Napoleon leans into the touch with a pleased sigh. Far above adequate. He finishes, allowing a moment’s distraction in the press of knuckles across the sliver of pale skin now visible between Illya’s open trousers and the hem of his shirt, and in the small grin at the nervous seize of abdominal muscles.

‘If you want to be even,’ says Illya, need subsuming panic, clear in the response of his body to the offer of Napoleon’s mouth on him, ‘don’t let me stop you,’ and uses his grip on Napoleon’s hair to pull his head forwards into his lap.

The rug has already grown mildly uncomfortable where it digs into Napoleon’s kneecaps, a position that is far from ideal, but the effect soon proves worth it, and Napoleon applies himself with abandon. Breathing remains obstinately difficult, but he takes his time to tease out of Illya all that he might give, one hand clamped over his flank to keep him still, fingers spread across the expanse of skin between ribcage and hip. Pliant and obedient, Illya does not move. It is a shame that the only comfortable angle Napoleon manages to find is one where he cannot keep looking up, settling instead for the secondary pleasure of hearing Illya’s breathless little gasps.

Illya has his free hand twisted in the fabric of Napoleon’s shirt, dragging the cotton across Napoleon’s back and hooking his fingers in the ridge of his shoulder blade. The other he keeps in Napoleon’s hair, not directing, content to simply hold him in case, perhaps, he needs to drag Napoleon back by force. He pulls and strokes in turn, even and hypnotic: each stroke, each brush of fingers, is reminiscent of the way he stroked the cat’s thick, soft fur. His touch speaks of the same unconscious claim, but it is far from idle and further still from absentminded.

The concessions Napoleon makes to keep favouring his broken nose and bruised jaw render it all messy, an unchaste surrender of decorum, but then, thinking of decorum now is for Napoleon as fruitful as trying to breathe with a broken nose and Illya’s cock down his throat. A lost cause.

‘Is better,’ says Illya — breathes, really, his accent made more pronounced by the slow build of climax; English sounds alien in his mouth when given the melodic cadence of a wholly different language, and it, like his fear and want earlier, washes over Napoleon, ‘when you don’t talk.’

Napoleon gives him a hint of teeth in return, and Illya twists in his hold like a pinned animal making one last desperate bid for freedom before subsiding again, settling back save for the small spasming, stuttering movements of his hips. Napoleon barely notices that he chokes, by then in enough pain to make his eyes water anyway, face long gone numb for all sensation except prickling, needling aches.

It does not take long, once he finds the little clockwork traps to Illya’s body, given to safecracking as he is, all the ways that Illya can be made to moan, and beg with nothing but the clench of fingers in Napoleon’s hair or at the back of his neck or digging into the meat of his shoulder. Yet he is quiet by the end, subdued and gone impliable with the effort of holding himself together, far too late. When he is done, when he has shaken apart in Napoleon’s hands and allowed Napoleon to ease him through plummeting adrenaline with a firm touch on his thighs, he extracts his fist from Napoleon’s hair with visible regret.

Napoleon smiles, an odd warmth suffusing his body in spite of the pain in his face, a different kind to the heat pooled in his stomach and waiting for release. He rolls down one sleeve to run it across his mouth, eyes never leaving Illya’s.

‘We’re even,’ he says. His voice is a hoarse ruin.

Illya smooths Napoleon hair out of his eyes. ‘Not yet. You didn’t…’

‘You don’t owe me.’

‘No,’ Illya agrees. He smiles to match Napoleon, but with a sudden boyish shyness, and with an edge of something dark, never to be tamed. He smiles more with his eyes than his lips. ‘But I want to watch.’

It takes a moment for the words and their meaning to sink in, with Illya’s voice unstrung and smoothed out into a low murmur, but when they do, Napoleon cannot help a noise of approval. He does most enjoy an audience, does his best when seen, and it’s a singular pleasure to know that it is something Illya recognises. Moving of their own volition to obey Illya’s tone — pleading and yet still brooking no argument, as if certain Napoleon will oblige — his hands are halfway to the buttons of his trousers. It does not occur to him to stand, or assume a more comfortable position, knees already gone stiff.

‘No.’ Illya stills the movement of his hands, taking careful hold of one of Napoleon’s bare forearms, bent forwards at a precipitous angle. He blocks the light and it illuminates him from the back, electric radiance lending his newly cropped hair a golden transparency. His thumb is pressed into the inside of Napoleon’s elbow, unmoving, and he says, ‘Like this.’

He leans back, pulling Napoleon with him by the back of the neck. Humiliation, Napoleon thinks, ready and willing to offer it if necessary; he can make himself assume the hot-faced shame of exposure, has done it before to truly masterful effect, but the slant of Illya’s expression is not one of a man bent on revenge. Napoleon lays his head on Illya’s thigh and reaches with one hand between his legs, leaving his trousers as they are, letting his eyes fall half shut. Illya does not need his humiliation, not precisely. He needs a reciprocity of unmaking. He was unmade in the chair, back at the compound, and he has been rendered unmade now, in different but curiously similar ways, and both at Napoleon’s hand.

Perhaps the two are one and the same, for Illya, sex and torture, both a surrender to the doubtful mercy of another. His body reacted in the chair, naked and restrained, primed and twisted long before Napoleon could lay his own claim to any resultant damage.

The pain of his realigned nasal bones worsens as blood rushes through his veins quicker, pounding, but the ache lends its own kind of unspoken privacy to the moment: Illya knows he is in pain, and Napoleon cannot and doesn’t try to help a soft noise that makes it past his parted lips. He brings himself off with nothing but the hard press of his palm through his trousers and Illya’s touch, stroking his neck, fingers trailing over the bruised bone of his eye socket.

He avoids Napoleon’s nose, but not the stitched gash on his brow. His thumb presses against Napoleon’s lower lip, drags across it, but never forcefully enough to reopen the cut there. Napoleon keeps his head on Illya’s thigh, the grounding texture of starched cotton a reprieve from the pounding ache in Napoleon’s face.

It is precarious, to be allowed so near to the vulnerable anatomy of Illya’s inner thighs, exposed though they are clothed. Mere inches between Napoleon and the femoral artery, and as he unravels under Illya’s gaze so does the thought of piercing fragile skin. He could kill Illya, this close, free of incriminating evidence, an audience, or consequences. His breath hitches, and Illya smiles down at him, eyes very dark. It is not the thought of laying his skin and bone open that undoes Napoleon, but the defeated acceptance in Illya’s expression. Illya would let him, like a half feral animal so used to the leash that once freed he would offer its end to Napoleon and ask to be owned.

Napoleon finishes in near silence, supplicant as if in prayer, Illya cradling his face in one hand, and for a horrifying moment he feels stripped utterly bare — seen right through, to the very nothingness he has always known to lurk in the marrow of his bones. He shudders through his climax and he shudders as he forces himself not to hide his expression, a gesture so unfamiliar it registers only as a wrongness.

They are even. The apartment is suffocating, the confined space a cage holding not one of them but both. Napoleon stands, telling himself it is Illya whom he grants a quick escape if he needs it. Illya takes him up on the unspoken offer, anyway, moving past Napoleon and swiftly out of the room, quiet as a hunting predator. He says nothing on the way out, too wrung out and already far too open. Napoleon is, for once, glad to be allowed a reprieve.

He sits on the chaise in the space vacated by Illya, warm from the heat of Illya’s body, wincing at the discomfort of his ruined trousers. He will have to wash them in the kitchen sink, something to do while he waits for the bruises to fade enough that they won’t paint him as an immediate target, outside. He needs something for his face, now, too; the throb of pain is beginning to drown out all other sensation, and Napoleon’s vision is spotted with patches of black.

He does not think of ownership, and leashes, and the willing offering of either. He does not think of ownership in the abstract and in practice. He does not think of its directionality.

In the deafening silence of Anatoly Ovechkin’s apartment Illya locks the bedroom door, and the turn of key in a lock is as loud as a gunshot.

…

The concrete floor is cold under Illya’s back, not yet or not ever to be warmed by his skin. Perhaps his skin gives off no heat. Perhaps the cartography of blood vessels spanning his body has already frosted over and it is not the concrete that is cold, only him. The cell is dark. The cell is dark and Illya lies on his back, and Napoleon —

Illya wakes face-down and choking on a pillow, with his arms tangled in the sheets.

He staggers out of bed, not yet with full awareness of where his limbs arrange themselves, uncoordinated and sweating through his vest. The apartment, for all of its familiarity, remains alien in the details: Illya tries three doors, none of which turn out to be the bathroom. He holds a hot, damp palm clamped firmly over his mouth and finally makes it to the kitchen. The tiles are freezing under his bare feet. He empties his stomach into the sink, and stays there, knees locked and arms spread to bracket the basin, dry-heaving long after there is nothing in him left to vomit.

He rinses his mouth with cold water, and washes his face. He pulls off the sodden vest and wipes the sweat that has not yet cooled on his skin. He stands, breathing, conscious of the air entering and leaving his lungs, and doesn’t think about drowning.

It is still dark outside, predawn blackness leaking into the apartment through uncovered windows. Pushed by an irrational instinct, an answer to some kind of primal fear of the unknown or unknowable, before he returns to the bedroom for another few hours of fitful sleep, Illya makes his way to the drawing room. He anchors the passage in reality with the touch of one hand on the wall, imagining that its texture is far rougher than it is, to keep it grounding.

Napoleon is asleep, curled up on the chaise in a position that cannot be fully comfortable: legs bent at half angles, one arm hanging over the edge, suspended. With the other, he keeps a slab of raw meat on his face, laid across his broken nose and dripping onto the floor — water or blood, or both. His breathing is steady and deep, and Illya makes sure the door does not creak when he pulls it closed behind him on the way out.

…

He wakes, again, with a mouthful of fur.

‘Mavka,’ he mutters into the cat purring contentedly on his face, ‘No. Go away,’ and then time and reality settle into themselves with the help of daylight and a hundred aching bruises and Illya remembers that his mother’s ill-tempered cat has been dead for fifteen years. This one might be of a milder disposition, but the memory of another animal and another apartment and another time is enough that Illya feels slightly sick. He pushes the cat off of himself without another word. Momentum carries it off the bed entirely, and Illya can do nothing but follow.

Morning lends the apartment a quality of hauntedness that Illya missed the day before, skirting the steep precipice of delirium and exhaustion that focussed his functionality to an absolute bare minimum necessary for only survival. It looks nothing like his childhood home, of course, and yet the similarity and the déjà vu as he crosses the hallway barefoot in the stark cold light of a winter morning are both overwhelming.

It has snowed in the night, and a thick layer of it rests on windowsills, the city outside shrouded in a deathly white. Everything is quiet, unmoving, but the peace of it feels deceptive. Illya feels as if he slept for a hundred years, and can only dread discovering how the world has changed before his waking. The cat pads after him to the kitchen, tail rigid and straight, keeping a respectful distance between itself and Illya.

Illya doesn’t think of Anatoly Ovechkin, whose clothes he wears, in whose bed he sleeps. He doesn’t wonder what might have happened to the man, exactly, after Napoleon got him across the Curtain.

He makes tea from water grey with limescale, in a glass he washed four times, little good that did him. In another world and in another time he would be expected to sit at the table and wait for his parents to join him, his mother moving around the kitchen listlessly as she prepared breakfast, cautious and out of place still in a space that had a scant few years prior been the domain of their housekeeper. After a brief glance at the table — Napoleon’s glass from yesterday still stood atop — Illya perches on the counter next to the sink, pulls up one knee to his chest for better balance, and methodically chews a slice of dry bread.

There is nothing he can do but settle into the new shape of his skin and the chassis of his bones that are Napoleon’s work. It’s how Napoleon finds him, soon afterwards: barefoot, bare-chested, though still not as bare and exposed as last night. He ignores the amused look, the raised eyebrows; he ignores the quiet exhalation of breath, as if Napoleon was not fully expecting to find Illya still in the apartment. He cannot ignore the livid bruises across Napoleon’s shoulders and sternum, to mirror his own, and lifts his gaze to see whether the cut in Napoleon’s lower lip reopened during the night. It did not.

‘Persistent little thing,’ says Napoleon. Illya looks up only high enough to see him gesture with his chin at the cat, where it is sat staring at Illya from across the kitchen. ‘Did you name it anything yet?’

Illya lifts one shoulder in a shrug. ‘It’s not mine to name.’

Napoleon moves with the same leisurely purpose as the cat, compact yet expansive, and at perfect ease with being observed. He puts the kettle on, the hot water Illya used long grown tepid, content to have Illya this close, at an arm’s distance. At a choking distance, if it came to that.

When he shifts sideways, the light throws his naked back into relief and Illya can think only of the suffocating heat and inevitability of the night before, of his fingers digging, hard, into Napoleon’s shoulder and back, as far as he could reach; nails razing across covered but unprotected skin. He did not draw blood, but Napoleon’s upper back is a terra incognita of angry red welts and blue-black bruises. Distinct fingerprints mark his shoulder blade, and Illya knows he could fit his palm perfectly over the sharp jut of bone, and push, and elicit a pained — pleased — noise from deep within Napoleon’s throat. They were addictive noises that Napoleon made on his knees, with Illya’s ungentle hands on him. They might not have been honest, by any sane person’s reckoning, but the physical necessities of addiction never need to be. The damaged tissue and skin draw Illya’s eye with the same inevitability as last night, the feeling familiar now, and it takes him a moment of silence stretching on for too long to realise that he is being watched in turn.

He looks down.

‘I tried to buy coffee,’ says Napoleon, stirring stale tea leaves with a fork. His tone is an invitation.

Illya can’t help a flash of amusement at the idea of Napoleon braving the grim reality of Moscow as lived by those unlucky enough to be the vast majority of its population. That, and he doubts Napoleon had any food coupons to spare.

‘Yes? And how did that go for you, cowboy?’

He knows Napoleon’s dramatic sigh for just another layer of manipulation. It still makes him bite his tongue on a laugh. He could not miss this, precisely, since it’s new. Perhaps what he missed was working with someone made entirely of contradiction and artifice, to be uncovered, less feline and more reptilian, a skin at a time. Perhaps he missed Napoleon, as a concept if not as a human being.

Finally Illya gathers himself enough to look Napoleon fully in the face. He raises his gaze and does not flinch at the sight of twin dark bruises nestled beneath Napoleon’s eyes, the swelling around his nose gone down enough that he can judge it set at a straight angle. It would be a shame otherwise, Napoleon’s face being the asset that it is. The bruising is consistent with the rest of the damage Illya dealt him, but striking nonetheless. In the dry morning light, stripped down to his trousers and sipping bad tea from a glass gone opaque with age and misuse, he seems almost touchable. Almost, though never fully, fixed at a point in time and space. A concrete reality rendered in flesh and blood.

There is a thin vertical cut above Napoleon’s right eyebrow, slightly to the side, that Napoleon stitched sometime yesterday, before the evening; Illya remembers well brushing his thumb over the clumsy stitches, firmly though not hard enough to make it bleed again. The thread crisscrosses a thin line of fresh scabbing, digging into flesh raised with inflammation.

Illya reaches across the counter and the sink to take Napoleon’s chin between thumb and index finger and tilt his head up, to catch the light at a better angle. He did not get a very good look at Napoleon’s work yesterday, with the light so low. ‘Very sloppy,’ he says. Napoleon lets himself be manhandled without comment, raising only the one eyebrow he can raise and not pull at the stitches. ‘It will scar. Sit.’

‘I’m told scars are rakish,’ says Napoleon, but obediently sits at the kitchen table, watching with uncanny alertness as Illya rummages through drawers in search of needle, thread, scissors and gauze towels, then takes the still unfinished bottle of vodka from the ice box.

‘They’re conspicuous. You are a bad enough spy as is.’

Napoleon only smiles, with half his mouth and too many teeth. He offers himself, willing to let Illya do what he might, hissing only once as Illya presses a vodka-soaked towel to clean and disinfect the cut. His eyes remain focussed studiously somewhere below Illya’s face, and with an inwards start Illya recalls how bright-eyed and captivated he looked, last night, staring at the ugly bruising around Illya’s neck, the gentle press of his mouth and cheek as he touched the bandaged cigarette burn on Illya’s palm. Illya does not let his hands shake. Instead, he pulls at the thread harder, and Napoleon’s gaze snaps back up.

It is both easier and far worse, when Napoleon looks at him like that, unshakeable and predatory even as he lays himself at the mercy of Illya’s hands.

‘You’re good at this,’ says Napoleon, very low and very pleased, ‘so I have to wonder…’ He trails off, eyes fixed this time on Illya’s temple.

‘It was supposed to scar.’

Napoleon only gives a hum of casual interest in response, but it does nothing to conceal the sudden intensity of his focus, curiosity clearly piqued even though they both know Illya will say nothing more. If Napoleon doesn’t yet know, he can check Illya’s file himself. The record following his release from Sukhanovka and graduation to field operative would not be censored.

They have no real first aid equipment, so all Illya can do in the absence of a proper dressing is finish the stitches and clean the cut once again with a bunched up towel. He spills vodka onto it generously, most of the alcohol having already evaporated, the gauze barely damp.

Napoleon doesn’t lift a hand to touch the restitched cut, as if content to trust in Illya’s ability.

‘Breakfast?’ he offers, and stands, taking Illya’s impassive shrug for assent. ‘I’ll give it a few more days, with this—’ he gestures at his bruised face ‘—well, like you said. Conspicuous. But I’d like to wrap things up, even if there’s not much of my cover to be salvaged. Are you on a deadline?’

 _I missed working with you_ , Illya thinks, watching Napoleon’s back as he sets to work at the kitchen counter. ‘No. I have contacts in Moscow, if you — I will stay.’

‘You know, I’d rather you didn’t get yourself killed now after all the lengths I went to, getting you out.’

‘They’re not KGB contacts.’

Napoleon shrugs, the welts and fingerprint bruises on his shoulder blade shifting across bone. ‘Then be my guest. I have another safehouse, in Prague. Extraction will be easier from there. You can help me finish; it shouldn’t take more than a few weeks, if your ex-brethren don’t murder us both first. A high enough chance of dying to keep things from getting dull. So.’ He turns, leaning against the counter, hands splayed next to his hips. ‘Ready to get back in the game, peril?’

Perhaps the choking familiarity of the apartment, with its old bookshelves and stale air, with the cat happily butting its head against his shin, with Napoleon a constant promise and a constant threat, apex predator allowing himself to be brought to heel — perhaps all of it exists so Illya can sever the thread himself, definitively and with no turning back, with a death warrant on his head and a loyalty divided neatly into halves.

He chased Napoleon across a continent. He made the decision long before now.

‘Yes.’

…

The phone rings at 4:15 in the morning.

Gaby startles awake, hand grabbing at the gun she keeps in the bedside drawer before awareness grips her fully and she drops back down onto the pillow. She presses her face into it, letting herself groan in sleepy annoyance. It’s dark outside; of course it is. Her bones are stiff with the pervasive damp cold of her London apartment, and she feels twenty years older than she is.

She picks up the receiver and says nothing, waiting for whoever it is on the other side to identify themselves. No one save informants, a handful of fellow agents and a few contacts should have this number.

‘Hello, Gaby.’

She bolts upright, rapidly cooling duvet falling from her bare shoulders. In the dark, her breathing and the crackle of static across the line both seem unbearably loud.

‘Did you kill him?’ she says, relieved to find that her voice remains steady.

‘Now,’ says Napoleon, curious and slow, ‘why would you ask that?’

‘He went after you to kill you. We both know what he’s like when he has a mission to complete.’ Gaby fixes her gaze on the wall across from her, bare and dark, and forces her vocal cords to lend her tone an affected lack of interest. She is not Waverly, but she knows how to play the game, now, on her own terms. Waverly. Gaby does not offer any information in that area, and keeps herself from wondering how much Napoleon knows. If her own intel is correct, it might not be much, save that she has been appraised of the situation. ‘The only way I can be talking to you now is if you killed him first. Did you?’

‘Everybody seems to think the worst of me. Frankly, it’s a little insulting.’

‘Answer the question, Solo,’ she snaps. Her free hand clenches into a tight fist in the duvet. He cannot see her, but she still wishes she were dressed for this conversation, and knows that it is precisely why he decided to call at such a time.

‘He’s alive.’ Napoleon lets out a breath of amusement, as if enjoying a private joke, or enjoying her unawareness of what he might find so funny. Gaby doesn’t let herself betray the wave of relief that makes her throat tight and her eyes itch. She does not move; if she did, Napoleon would know how deeply affected she can be by nothing more than a few words. He might suspect, but Gaby cannot bring herself to give him the power of certainty. ‘The operation is a bust. My cover is blown.’

‘Need backup?’

‘If you could arrange for transport in four weeks, out of — Prague, let’s say, for Illya. That would help.’

‘For Illya,’ Gaby echoes. She pauses, allowing Napoleon a moment’s benefit of the doubt. When he does not elaborate, she feels something cold settle in the pit of her stomach, something freezing that has nothing to do with winter in London. ‘Will I be seeing you again?’

His turn to pause. For all his falsehoods, when he finally answers his voice is stripped of its usual lustre. He sounds human, and almost vulnerable, and all the more terrifying for it.

‘You know, I honestly couldn’t say.’


End file.
